


Whatever Comes Our Way

by SylvanWitch



Series: Biker 'Verse [7]
Category: Sons of Anarchy, Supernatural
Genre: Apocalyptic crossover of doom, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-07
Updated: 2012-08-07
Packaged: 2017-11-11 15:56:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 50,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/480247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Jax Teller sends the First Charming Expeditionary Force out to explore what remains of the western US, he hardly expects the most dangerous unknown is lurking right there in his own backyard.  As Dean's hunting skills are brought to bear, their marriage and Charming itself are tested.  Volume Five of the Biker 'Verse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whatever Comes Our Way

_The thing about being away for so long?  It gives you a bigger heart for coming home._   (Letters 3:15-16.)

 

“Don’t put too much torque on it or you’ll—.”

 

“Strip the bolt.  I know, Dean.”

 

“Alright, alright,” Dean answers, ducking under the hood prop and standing back to watch Sam strain against the wrench handle.  For all the kid’s put on a couple of inches lately, he’s still whip-thin, lean and light-boned.  Some days, he reminds Dean of his brother so much, he can’t take a full breath.

 

Sam lets go a string of swearwords, and Dean laughs—in this at least, the kid’s nothing like Sammy at all—before he remembers he’s not supposed to encourage that kind of language.

 

“Watch your mouth,” he says automatically, but it’s not very convincing—he’s still grinning.

 

“Yeah, yeah,” Sam gruffs half-heartedly, distracted by the effort of getting the bolt free.  They’d been working on the engine mounts for the past two days, trying to get the monster 307 Rocket out of there and up on the hoist so they could take it apart.

 

The Delta ’88 wasn’t much to look at, more rust than color, as Bobby used to say, but she had a good engine, or at least Sack thought so, which is why he’d rescued her.  She’d been destined for the Junker Bunker that protected Charming’s northern gate when Bobby Elvis had brought her in on the tow truck from some back lot or abandoned garage to the south of town.

 

Jax had offered the use of a bay at Teller-Morrow, but Dean had declined.  He spent enough time at the clubhouse as it was, and besides, the kid probably didn’t need any more encouragement with his biker obsession.

 

“Gonna get him a cut,” Jax had threatened, smirking, and Dean had made a gesture that clearly expressed what he thought of Jax’s idea.

 

The growing roar of a familiar engine brings Dean’s eyes to the end of the block, and though he’d never admit it even under the worst sort of torture—and he knew from torture—his heart clenched and jumped at the sight of Jax rounding the corner on his bike.

 

A snort from the vicinity of his elbow brings his eyes back to Sam, who is standing there with a bolt clutched triumphantly in one hand and a knowing smirk on his dirty face.

 

“Shut up,” Dean mutters, and Sam laughs.  “And get cleaned up for dinner.  Ten minutes,” he barks to Sam’s already receding back.  The kid can move like the wind and twice as quiet when he wants to.  It’s  spooky.

 

Jax parks in the driveway and stows his brain bucket, tired smile tracking from Dean’s face to his filthy hands and back.  The smile grows into something else, a hunger for more than the stew Dean has waiting on the stove inside.

 

“Sam’s here,” Dean says by way of warning, and Jax nods, smile growing rueful.  Lately, Sam’s been at the house a lot.  Dean knows Jax doesn’t mind, but still, maybe he should make a point of sending the kid home earlier now and again. 

 

“Figured.”  He spares a glance for the hulk leaving oil stains on the concrete.  “How’s it going?”

 

“Slow.”

 

“Sack’d be more than happy to—.”  
  
“Not the point,” Dean interrupts.  It’s an old debate, and Jax lets it go with another weary smile.

  
“Long day at the office?” Dean asks, following Jax into the garage, where they’d put in a stationary sink supplied by water from a rain barrel out back.  While he scrubs his hands free of whatever grease isn’t already ingrained, Jax details the usual bullshit of daily life as King of the World.

 

“Looks like we’re going ahead with the Expedition proposal,” he adds after a pause while Dean dries off and they head inside to take the stew from where it simmers on the stove.

  
“Dinner,” Dean calls, raising his voice just enough to carry toward the living room, from which the sound of the television can clearly be heard—Dean’s _Wild, Wild West_ collection by the sounds of it.

  
“Hey, Jax,” Sam says, sliding into his seat and giving the biker a big smile.  Sam still worships the ground Jax walks on, even if Jax does “take it up the ass,” as Sam is fond of noting.

 

“Hey,” Jax answers easily, passing the kid a bowl already brimming with fragrant stew.

 

“Miriam’s?” Jax asks as Dean hands him his own bowl.

  
Dean nods.  “She insisted,” he explains.  Miriam is sixty-two, if a day, and has had a crush on Dean since the first time he’d told her she made the best pie in the world.  Never mind that it might’ve been the only pie in the world at the time, the woman had decided Dean needed tender loving care and hadn’t been the least deterred to discover that Dean was both gay and boning the president of the Sons of Anarchy.

  
Instead, she’d just adopted the whole crew.

 

“Right.”  Jax draws the word out, and Sam snorts into his spoon.

 

“I didn’t want to hurt her feelings,” Dean answers, hand going to his heart in mock innocence.

 

“Whatever,” Sam says under his breath, rolling his eyes at Jax, who responds with a grin.

 

“Comedians.  I’m surrounded by comedians,” Dean grouses.

 

“Any word on the Expedition?” Sam asks after a suitable period of silence had gone by while they appreciated their stew.

 

“We’re presenting it to the Town Council at tomorrow’s meeting,” Jax answers.

 

“You think it’ll fly?” Sam, always eager to hear Jax’s business, seems especially interested in the Expedition.  Warning bells put up a distant clamor in Dean’s brain.

 

“I think so.  Might take some convincing, but it’s for the good of Charming.”

 

Dean shakes his head.  “I don’t know.  I think you’re going to have trouble from the usual sources.”

 

Jax shrugs.  “Nothing we haven’t handled before.”

  
“Yeah, but this is a lot bigger deal than where to put the town compost pile or who gets the next license to farm pigs.”

 

It had been Opie’s idea to explore the world out beyond Charming’s borders for a longer period of time than it usually took them to simply raid nearby towns for dwindling supplies.

  
“We need to know who and what’s out there,” Ope’d said over their weekly Wednesday spaghetti dinner at the clubhouse.  “We need to find out if there are other people living in towns and cities who maybe don’t have access to radio.  And we need to find a way to supply those things we can’t get from our allies.”

 

Their “allies” consisted of seven towns and cities that made up The South and Southwestern Confederacy, a group of loosely-allied independent city-states.  Four months ago, they’d had their first conference, at which they’d established trading policy and schedules, among many other things.  But while the confederacy had increased Charming’s available supplies exponentially, there were still a number of items unavailable in any significant quantity.

 

Piney’s oxygen was one of those items.

 

“It isn’t just about oxygen,” Ope had insisted later, when it was just the crew plus Dean in the Chapel.  “We need to know what’s out there—potential threats, future allies, whatever.  It makes sense, Jax.”

 

“It’s dangerous as hell,” Jax had answered.  Dean could tell Jax hated the idea even as he knew it was necessary, and he’d felt the ghost of familiar pain, old but no less potent.  Jax wasn’t the only one who’d had to put his loved ones on the line for the greater good. 

  
Since then, they’d spent weeks planning their route and figuring out manpower, food, ammo, and fuel requirements for the trip.

 

Now all they had to do was gain approval from the Town Council.

 

To a man, Dean can predict who is going to be a pain in the ass at tomorrow’s meeting, but he doesn’t want to push Jax on it now.  He can see the lines around Jax’s mouth, deeper than usual, and the circles that shadow his eyes.

 

“Can I go?” Sam asks, effectively changing the subject.  Both men know he isn’t talking about attending the Town Council meeting.

  
“No, you can’t.”  Dean’s answer is firm and a little tired.  Always an active kid, even restless, Sam’s been harder to handle lately, which is one of the reasons for the Delta ’88 taking up space outside.

 

“Why not?”  Sam’s tone is challenging, bordering on disrespectful.  
  
Dean pins him with a look and doesn’t answer for a long minute.  It isn’t for lack of good reasons.  Sam’s age, his size relative to the other potential Expeditionary guys, his schooling, all of these are reasonable answers to Sam’s petulant challenge.

But Dean is an expert at dealing with difficult teenagers, having had all the experience he’d ever need with his brother, who was pushier than Sam and a champion brooder, to boot.  At Sam’s age, thirteen, Dean’s brother had once kept Dean at the dinner table for three hours arguing the merits of letting him, Sam, borrow the Impala for a date dance.  The facts that Sam didn’t know how to drive and didn’t have a license hadn’t been the least deterrents for Sam’s barrage of arguments.

 

Dean remembers that he’d almost let Sam take the car, too.

 

“You have responsibilities here, Sam.  And besides, who’s going to work on the ’88 if you’re off getting yourself into trouble in Montana?”

 

Dean realizes his mistake the minute the question leaves his mouth, but it’s too late to retract it, and Sam says, with predictably pointed clarity, “Does that mean you aren’t going, either?”

 

Dean darts a glance at Jax, who’s wearing the deliberately neutral expression he puts on when he doesn’t want anyone to know what he’s really feeling.

 

Since Dean’s not just anyone, he has a pretty good idea what Jax is actually worried about.  Dean hasn’t given Jax an answer to this question, either.

 

So he does what Winchesters do best.  He deflects:  “Whether or not I go isn’t the point.  Point is, you’re not going.  Period.”

 

“But—.”

 

“Look, you want dessert or you want to argue some more?”

 

“Fine,” Sam gracelessly concedes, slumping in his chair.  Dean can usually count on the kid’s appetite to rein him in when dinner conversation gets out of control.  This is another way in which this Sam is not Dean’s brother.

 

Dessert and dishes done, the latter thanks to Sam, who’s pretty good about doing his chores without being asked, Dean and Jax see Sam off, watching him as he pedals his bike out of sight around the corner and off toward The Hostel, where he lives with kids a lot older than himself but seems to get along just fine.

 

“He had a fair question,” Jax observes as they’re walking back into the house.

 

Dean sighs and nods, stops at the kitchen long enough to grab a couple of beers and then jerks his head toward the back door.

 

On a rise behind their house is a brick fireplace, wood stacked neatly on one side, kindling and lighter in a covered plastic bucket on the other.  In front of the fireplace are lawn chairs, the kind with the adjustable backs so they can be tilted almost prone, a good position for star-gazing.

  
Tonight, they both look straight on into the fire Jax starts, each of them waiting for the other to start.

 

At last, Dean sighs, one long-held breath, and says, “You going to ask?”

 

“Already have.”

 

True enough.  Jax had asked Dean when the idea of the Expedition had first come up.  Had asked him if he wanted to lead it.  Dean knew then and knows now what it cost Jax to ask that question, how much he hates the idea of giving Dean orders that might lead to his husband’s death.

 

To Jax’s credit, Dean knows Jax will accept whatever Dean decides, regardless of how he feels about it personally.

 

That makes it harder, rather than easier, to come to a decision.  But if Jax’s going to bring the Expedition plan to the Town Council tomorrow, he’s going to need to name the leader.

 

“I’m not gonna lie.  It’s tempting.”

 

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Jax give a tight nod, sees his shoulders tense, too, like he’s waiting for a blow.

 

And it is tempting, the idea of hitting the road, watching the broken yellow line blur into a solid arrow pointing him over the next horizon.  For the majority of his life, the only home Dean knew was on four wheels, the only stability the people sharing the ride with him. 

 

Those last few years alone had taken a toll on Dean, it’s true, the road no longer familiar or comforting, and not just because it was populated by demonic dangers. But he’s never quite gotten used to staying put, either, and there are mornings he wakes up to the same ceiling, the same deep-pile green bedroom rug, the same coffeemaker, and he’s tempted to just get in the Impala, skip his hospital rounds, and drive.

 

He doesn’t, of course, because he’s got obligations and people waiting for him to return. 

 

But this, the Expedition—that’s sanctioned travel.  He wouldn’t be disappointing anyone if he went along.  Hell, if Jax made him the leader, he’d just be doing his job.

 

Beside him, Jax is still as stone, and Dean knows he’s waited too long, knows that by his very silence he’s given Jax the wrong idea.

 

“Tempting or not, this is my home now,” he says at last.  “I’m not going anywhere.”

 

The creak of the chair as Jax shifts his weight is the only sound that lets Dean know his husband’s heard him, and he waits, giving Jax time to process Dean’s decision, not entirely sure what his reaction might be.

 

He doesn’t expect a hand snaking across his thigh to cup him through the denim, but that’s the sort of surprise he can get behind, and he eases down in the chair so he can spread his legs wider, giving Jax all the access he wants.

 

The cold place on his leg where Jax’s hand was gives him pause long enough to wonder if maybe he misread the other’s intentions, and then Jax is clarifying it for Dean by getting up and stepping between Dean and the fire, dropping to his knees with enviable grace, hipping Dean’s legs wider and pulling him flush against the bulge in his own fly.

 

“I’m going to fuck you,” Jax says, steady and quiet, like they’re talking about the expiration date on the milk or whether or not they need more bread.  “Drive my cock so deep inside of you you’ll taste it in your throat for days.  And then I’m going to suck you off until the neighbors call the cops for all your  screaming.  Okay?”

 

Dean nods, suddenly dry-throated, words abandoning him as Jax works open his button and slides down his zipper, tugs roughly at his waistband, urging Dean to raise his hips and let Jax strip him from the waist down.

  
The cold air slaps his sensitive skin and he shivers, flesh pilling in the chill, but his shiver turns to a shudder as Jax breathes open-mouthed along his inner thigh and licks a line up behind his balls.

 

Dean throws his head back, eyes sliding shut, volitionless as Jax buries his nose in the join of Dean’s thigh and huffs a breath against the skin of his balls, following the heat with a searing tongue that leaves a line of wet along the underside of his cock. 

 

The heat turns to cold as Jax backs away long enough to shuck off his sneakers, socks, jeans and boxers.  He leaves Dean’s boots on, effectively hobbling Dean with his own jeans and shorts, but Dean can’t find it in him to care as Jax’s heat returns, followed by his tongue once more making his thighs shake with need. 

 

It’s a strange sensation to be half-naked in the cool winter air, the soft fabric of Jax’s sweatshirt rubbing against the fine hairs of Dean’s inner thighs, but as Jax leans down to drive his tongue between Dean’s cheeks, all strangeness is forgotten. 

 

Dean bites back a, “Fuck, Jax!” and spreads his knees, ignoring a twinge of protest from them in favor of focusing on the slow tease Jax is practicing on the puckered muscle under his tongue.  “Jax,” he warns, and Jax chuckles against him, tongue plunging inside, curling and questing, until Dean is writhing under him, entirely incapable of sitting still for the pleasure curling up his spine.

  
“Please,” he surrenders at last, and Jax laughs, a rich, happy sound that spikes the pleasure in Dean’s belly and almost brings him off without a touch.

 

Once more he’s cold where Jax’s heat has left him, and Dean pries one eye open to see Jax sitting back on his heels, cock hard and shining damply in the scant light of the half-moon hovering just above the treeline.

 

“Come down here,” Jax says, stroking himself and fixing Dean with an unmistakable look.

 

Clumsily, almost boneless with Jax’s treatment and handicapped by his denim fetters, Dean slides to his knees in front of Jax, who reaches around Dean to knock the lawn chair over and out of the way.

 

“Turn around.”

 

Dean swallows a groan at Jax’s tone, one the biker usually reserves for ordering around someone who needs to be reminded of his place.  They don’t play this game often—they live on equal terms, always—but when Jax talks that way, it makes something low in Dean’s gut tighten, makes his cock twitch. 

 

He does as he’s told, offering up his ass, head pillowed on his crossed arms, air cold in the crack until Jax traces a finger down it and slips inside Dean’s hole.

 

He’s not ready, not entirely, but it doesn’t matter, the roughness right, the burn real, and Dean groans loudly, not caring that Liz next door might hear, maybe even getting off on the idea of her watching them from her kitchen window.

 

Jax twists his finger, introduces a second, and this time it hurts, Dean’s groan turning sharper until Jax crooks his fingers and strikes the spot that sparks Dean up, driving him to shift his weight back onto Jax’s fingers, seeking that pressure once more.

  
“Fuck, Dean, yeah,” Jax breathes, drawing Dean upright, Dean’s weight dropping him further onto Jax’s fingers, and Jax bites Dean’s shoulder where it joins the long column of his neck even as he reaches around to grip Dean’s neglected cock in a callused hand.

 

Before he can register that he’s no longer riding Jax’s fingers, Dean feels the blunt push of Jax’s cock against him and sinks back, letting Jax’s other hand guide him home, ignoring the stretch and burn for the friction of Jax’s hand on his cock and the steady way he’s saying Dean’s name, low and strained like a helpless prayer.

 

At this angle, Jax lights Dean up with every thrust, driving Dean up into the tight circle of his fist, gravity doing the work of bring Dean back down until he swears he can feel Jax in the back of his throat, from which Jax is wringing hoarse cries.

 

Jax’s name breaking in a shout, Dean comes hard, stars in negative bursting darkly across the sliver of sky overhead as Jax tugs him roughly once more and pulses inside of him, burying his shouts against Dean’s neck where he’s going to have a hell of a hickey to show for their loving.

 

“Jesus,” Dean mutters a few minutes later, voice wrecked, cock a little sore from rough handling, ass dripping as Jax slides out of him and helps him steady himself long enough to stand.  The front hem of his flannel is wet against his belly as he bends over to pull up his pants, but he couldn’t give a flying fuck as he staggers three steps to the lawn chair, rights it, and sits—carefully—wincing a little at the way the collar of his shirt rubs against the spot on his neck that Jax had savaged.

 

“Jesus,” Jax echoes, yanking on his jeans but ignoring socks and sneakers in favor of digging his feet into the warm earth near the fireplace’s brick apron.

 

“I guess that means you’re happy I’m staying?” Dean’s self-satisfied tone earns a one-fingered salute from his husband, who has reclined the chair back and is staring up at the sky. 

 

Dean follows Jax’s example, and they stay like that for a long time, until the moon has cut a shallow arc against the sky and sunk once more out of sight behind the trees.

  
Finally, when the fire’s nothing but winking embers, they rise, Jax walking gingerly for his bare feet, Dean for the twinge in his ass, and stumble their way toward the house like two drunks home from a bender.

 

It’s not until they’re inside and Jax is pressing Dean against the closed door, whispering private words against his lips and promising things with his eyes and his hands, that Dean realizes just how scared Jax was of Dean saying, “I’m going,” and then he’s sorry he made his husband wait so long to hear his answer. 

 

He spends the next little while getting Jax naked and apologizing, also without a single word, until both of them are sated, sore, and in serious need of a shower, which is how the morning finds them, too.

 

*****

 

 _For some, the things they do define them.  For others, it’s what they say that people remember.  For me, I hope it’ll be what I didn’t do:  didn’t run, didn’t scream, didn’t beg or plead.  Remember that I faced into the worst of it and didn’t back down._ (Letters 6:17-20)

 

Rita’s giving him the kind of look that if he weren’t God’s chosen and King of the Motherfucking World might have him turning tail and hauling his ass out of there as fast as he could without actually running.

 

Ope’s just said, “Alright,” in that serious tone he takes when he knows he’s in deeper than he’d like.

 

Which is probably true, since Opie had just agreed to be the Captain of the Charming First Expeditionary Force.

 

“Horse’ll be your second in command, and you can have whatever guys you want.  We’ll have a couple of gunboats with fifties, too.”

 

If he sounds desperate, he might be, a little.  Rita’s edging toward the sink drainer, where a black-handled carving knife gleams suggestively.

 

Ope nods absently, eyes distant as he calculates the long game.

 

Jax knows he’s tapped the right man, but it’s not the man he’s worried about.  Ope’s old lady is scheming murder.

 

As her hand reaches out to the drainer, Jax tenses, inching his own toward the gun he has stowed against the small of his back.  He’s trying to imagine how it’s all going to play out, where he can hit Rita to do the least damage but still stop her in her tracks, when her hand comes up with a coffee mug and she quirks a brow toward the pot on the stove.

 

“Coffee?”

 

Jax breathes out and shakes his head.  “Nah, we don’t have time.  I’ve got to brief Ope on the way to the meeting.  It starts in an hour.”

 

He’d asked Ernst Anderson, de facto Town Secretary, to schedule a special Saturday session so that everyone can be there who’s interested in hearing what the Sons are planning now.  They’re expecting a sizeable crowd.

 

Ope excuses himself, and as soon as his boot falls on the bottom step to the second floor, Rita’s next to Jax, knife held casually in one hand, loaf of bread in the other. 

 

“I know this is a big deal for Opie, that it says a lot that you trust him with this,” she starts, and Jax relaxes an inch, thinking he’s going to get off easy.

  
“But if anything happens to him,” she begins, slicing through the bread with enough force that the blade sticks in the cutting board.  Through teeth gritted with the effort of yanking it free, she completes her threat, “I’ll cut your balls off and shove them down your throat until you choke on them.  Got it?”

 

“Yes, ma’am,” he says without hesitation.  She means it, and he knows it.  And maybe in an earlier time—Before, as they call it, initial capital always evident—he’d have put her in her place for the old lady she is.

But now, when people make what relationships they can, build lives that matter out of what’s left, he hasn’t got any room to bitch at her for feeling protective of her home and family.

 

Besides, Jax had felt the same way about the possibility of Dean leading the mission.  He’s a lot of things, some of them bad, but a hypocrite isn’t one of them.

 

“You make sure his brothers keep him safe,” she says, and there’s something of the contract in her tone and the way her dark eyes bore into Jax’s own, examining his face for any hint of doubt, anything she should be worried about or mistrust.

  
He nods.  “You don’t have to worry about that,” he assures her, and there’s a promise in his voice, too.

 

She nods, abandoning the bread-slicing when Ope pounds down the stairs and pauses in the kitchen doorway only long enough to say, “Ready?”

 

Jax brushes a kiss across Rita’s cheek and slides past Ope, waiting discreetly near the front door while the couple says their considerably less chaste goodbyes.

 

“She threaten to cut off your balls?” Ope asks, sotto voce, as they make their way down the walk to the Impala, parked curbside.

 

“Yep.”

 

“She means it,” Ope sounds a little worried.

  
“Don’t I know it,” Jax answers, laughing out a short burst of air and slapping Ope on the shoulder.  “She’s a good woman, Ope.”

 

Ope’s grin is proud and a little embarrassed.

 

“Dean lets you drive this thing?” Ope asks.

 

“Shut up,” Jax answers, starting the car.  “I figured you and me need to talk, so we swapped.  Dean’ll get there on my bike.”

 

Jax doesn’t need to look at his best friend to see Ope’s expression.

  
“You wear each other’s clothes, too?”

 

Jax’s answer is decidedly manual, and Ope barks a short laugh before getting down to business.

 

“You think we’re going to take shit at this meeting.”

 

Jax snorts.  “I figure the usual faction will be there bitching about how I’m not doing anything right.”  He catches Ope’s affirming nod out of the corner of his eye.

 

They don’t really have to talk about preliminary plans, since the Expedition was Opie’s idea to begin with, but they do have to toss around strategies for handling the naysayers.

  
Though the fate of the Reverend Hooper and his ilk had taken care of a lot of opposition to Jax’s leadership both within Charming and in the erstwhile minister’s remaining flock, as well, there were still a few pains in the ass who insisted on complaining loud and often about Jax’s dictatorial tendencies.

 

Jax’s usual answer was the polite, verbal version of the gesture he’d just given Ope.  This time, though, they’re going to need resources, and while Jax and his brothers technically control the majority of munitions and most of the heavy transport, they will have to put a dent in Charming’s surplus fuel supply for the trip.

 

Not to mention they’ll be taking a percentage of the town’s ablest bodies with them on the road.

 

They consider who’s likely to be the biggest problem, speculate on where Sheriff Hale will come down on the mission, and plan for where to place the other Sons so as to best seed the audience with supporters.

 

Not that Jax intends to intimidate his neighbors, necessarily, but he’s not above reminding them of the service the Sons have done for the town.

 

There’s a gauntlet of reapers waiting for him when he brings the Impala up to the curb and parks her in the spot reserved for him there.  Dean is leaning against Jax’s bike deep in conversation with Sack, probably about carburetors or transmissions or some other gearhead shit. 

 

Back slaps, hand shakes, smiles and greetings take up a space of sidewalk broad enough that newcomers to Charming step out into the street and around the wall of gleaming Harleys to avoid the leather-clad mob.

 

People who know them, though, approach and add to the noise.  Peri Winkler bounces up with a more sedate Lucas Kreiger in tow.  He smiles and blushes at Jax’s lewd wink—the couple has been dating for almost a year, and it’s clear they’re both lost causes—and Peri’s giggle peals across the gathered crowd, turning heads.

 

Dan and Jenny Jett greet Jax, who smiles widely and nods at Jenny’s belly and then gives her a careful hug.  “You look great.”

 

The woman, round-bellied and spraddle-footed, rubs her belly and beams.  Dan looks like he might burst apart from either pride or worry; Jax gives the causes even odds, and he can’t blame Dan after what had happened to their first baby, but he tries to keep his own concern off of his face.  They haven’t had any kind of outbreak since the Reverend Hooper’s lightning demise, but it’s never far from his mind. 

 

 _The children are our future_ isn’t just a lame lyric when you’re living on the edge of The End.

 

At least they have Dean, miracle worker, a title Jax only ever uses in his own head.  He doesn’t relish nursing the broken lip he’d earn if he said it out loud in front of his husband.

 

For all that Dean’s hands are usually filthy with engine grease or efficiently stripping and cleaning a gun, he’s got a gift for healing that can’t be denied any more than it can be explained.  And he’s gotten better in the last few months, pretty much since he’d brought Juice back from death’s waiting room.

 

Of course, the gift seems to have gotten more selective, kind of like the reverse power of God’s scything lightning that separates the saints from smoking piles of ash.  Dean’s healing mojo works only on those in the most desperate need and only if they’ve still got something left to offer.  If they’re too old or too infirm, damaged beyond reasonable repair or in some way a danger to the community, Dean’s gift just doesn’t seem to fire up.

 

It frustrates the shit out of Dean, but Jax thinks his husband has grown resigned to his limitations.

 

At least where healing people is concerned.

  
“I’m telling you, the frame’s solid.  Once we get her up and brush off the rust, do the undercarriage, she’ll be golden.”

 

“Ay, sure, ‘cause parts for an ’83 ’88 are so easy to come by,” Chibs scoffs, smirking at Dean’s obvious obsession with the old car.

 

“We’ve got two ‘88s in the Bunker,” Dean insists.  “And we can always retrofit if we have to.  No big deal.”

 

Sack joins in then, something about hoses, and Jax abandons the thread of conversation to talk to Miriam Essert, who runs the café in town and keeps Dean in beef stew.

 

“Business good?”

 

Miriam smiles.  “Always.”  She accepts donations of foodstuffs in exchange for making pastries and simple meals for the people who make up her café cooperative.  It’s a system that’s worked without a hitch so far, which Jax has always credited to Miriam’s steady nature and patience.  He could take lessons from her in diplomacy, that’s for sure.

 

“Thanks for the stew,” he adds, offering her a knowing grin.  She winks unabashedly at him and turns a warm look on Dean, who catches her smile out of the corner of his eye and stumbles over whatever point he was trying to make with Chibs.

  
Chibs laughs and slaps him on the shoulder, turning away.  Sack likewise abandons Dean to Miriam’s tender mercies, and he casts a helpless look at Jax, who shrugs and walks toward where Blue, Horse Conyer, and Ope are deep in conversation near the steps of the Town Hall.

 

“How we doing for guns?” Jax asks without preamble.  Blue always appreciates getting right to business.

  
The leader of Charming’s Army tilts his head back and squints at the blue sky, considering.  Then he shrugs off his thoughts and says, “We’re good.  I can give you two fifties, one for each of the gunboats.  Every man can have his personal choice of weapons, of course, and we’ve got plenty of room in the gunboats for ammo, though you’ll want to have back-up stores in every vehicle, just in case you get separated or something else goes wrong.”

 

It’s the “something else” they’ve been debating for weeks, ever since Ope had presented the Expedition idea at a joint Sons/Charming’s Army cookout.  They can only plan for the eventualities they can predict.  The weird shit, Dean’s bailiwick, is unknown, and short of sending Dean along, there’s going to have to be significant guesswork.

 

Best they can do is take every precaution they can think of within reason and let skill and experience sort out the surprises.

 

“Fuel?” he asks Horse.  He’d given the big man first right of refusal for the 2IC position, but Horse had predictably agreed, in his typical terse way, and taken upon himself the task of securing a tanker and enough fuel for the roughly 4500 mile round trip route they’d laid out.

 

“Got a tanker in good shape, the one Hap picked up in Stockton a couple years back.” 

  
Jax nods, remembering the intensely loyal Son, missing him for a heartbeat before letting the old pain go.  If he was tripped up by every grief, he’d never get ahead at all.

 

“It was half-full when it came in, and we tested the diesel—still good.  Little dry gas should take care of any moisture in the tank.  That’s about 4000 gallons, give or take a couple hundred.  The Hummers use the most fuel,” Horse continues, indicating the two armored Humvees they’d “liberated” from a military surplus yard down the coast a few months back.  These were the “gunboats” they were planning to arm with fifty caliber guns, one to each roof mount.  Horse and Blue had parked them out in front of the Town Hall to make a point about preparedness.

 

“But unless we’re pulling some heavy shit with them, even those will have plenty of diesel.”

 

“We got wiggle room?” Ope asks.  “We’ll be a long way from home.”

 

Horse shrugs.  “Yeah.  And besides, it’s not like we can’t get fuel from our Confederates if we need it.”

 

“Yeah, but except for Fallon and Three Rivers, the rest of our ‘diplomacy visits’ are on the back end of the tour.”

 

Ope’s got the map memorized and it’s his show, so no one questions his assertion.

 

“We’ll have enough,” Horse insists, and Jax catches Ope’s eye.  They exchange a look, and Ope concedes, nodding at Horse.

 

“I trust you.  Just have to be sure.”

 

Horse nods back.  “’Course.”

 

They throw around some further concerns, all ground they’ve already covered but that they’re happy to walk over again.  No one—not even Opie—is entirely comfortable with the mission they’re undertaking.  A lot can go wrong in Stockton, practically in their backyard.  The potential for harm increases exponentially the further they get from the safety of home.

 

Still, if it wasn’t worth the risk, it wouldn’t be worth the doing.

 

That’s exactly what Opie is saying—for the fourth time during the meeting—when Jax finally stands up and raises his voice, effectively drowning out Mitch Auburn, who’s been tag-teaming Max Steinburg for the honor of most often interrupting the proceedings with objections.

 

“Enough!”

 

Jax’s voice carries weight, not just volume, and Mitch and Max take their seats, albeit with sullen, rebellious expressions promising future outbursts.

 

“The fact of the mission isn’t up for debate,” Jax reiterates—he’d started the meeting with that point, but apparently no one had been paying attention, too busy marking out their turf to actually listen.  “We’re going.  What we want to know is how far Charming’s willing to back us.  We’ve got guns and ammo, plenty of food and water, and willing men—and women—,” Jax hastens to add, having already been taken to task for excluding Grace Cho and Tammy Rae Ortner from his earlier remarks. “—who’ve volunteered for the mission.  What we’re asking from you is your understanding about the slight decline in, uh, person power—.”

 

“And for fuel.  That tanker is our emergency supply.”

 

Whit Marksey’s tone manages to imply that Jax is both brain-damaged and naïve, and Jax has to grit his teeth and let out a slow breath through his nostrils before he answers.

 

“That’s right.  It is.  _Ours_.  Our club risked their lives to bring it back from Stockton.  Our guys fixed up the engine.  Our brothers scavenged spare tires.  And some of those guys didn’t live to see what good their work would do for us.  Some of those guys aren’t safe in Charming today.  They died on medicine or food runs, on missions to Lodi and Modesto and Roseville.  They died trying to get the things you need to survive.”

 

Maybe it’s heavy-handed—Jax can see Ope’s shoulders tensing, his expression shifting to a certain stiffness Jax recognizes for disapproval—but he’s sick of Marksey’s smug expression and Steinburg and Auburn’s self-important bullshit.

 

“This isn’t about what belongs to me or to you or to Biddy over there,” Jax waves a hand in the direction of the town’s longest lived resident, who preens a little in her seat and beams at Jax.  “It’s about what’s best for Charming.  And this Expedition is best for us.  We can’t sit here in our safe little houses behind our divine shield and hope that the world is going to get better.”

 

“But you have no idea what’s out there,” Jim Edriss protests.

 

“And we won’t until we go out there and see for ourselves,” Jax answers, impatience making his voice tight and hard.

 

“What if we call attention to ourselves?” Jenny Jett asks, her voice a little uncertain but her words carrying nonetheless.  “I mean, what if there’s something bad out there that doesn’t know about us, and we wave a red flag at it or something.”

 

Hands crossed protectively over her belly, her fear is plain to read, and Jax softens a little.

 

“That’s a possibility,” he concedes, holding up a hand to forestall the interruption he’d sensed coming from the Steinburg camp.  “But even if that happened, we’d still have God’s protection.”

 

Even after all the years—and all the evidence affirming Jax’s right to rule and Charming’s unique condition—Jax has trouble saying those words without hesitating.  But if there’s ever been a time to assure his people that they’re safe, it’s now, when he’s talking about opening the world up to Charming—and vice versa.

 

Jenny doesn’t look entirely convinced, but Dan has gently pried one of her hands away from her swelling belly and is squeezing it between both of his own.  She nods, still skeptical but clearly leaning to Jax’s side, and he scans the crowd for others who might need a simple little nudge to bring them over.

Miriam, as always, has eyes only for Dean, who’s leaning in the doorway to the right of and slightly behind the head table where Jax, Ope, Blue, and Horse are sitting.

 

Dean must feel Jax’s regard, because he stops glowering menacingly at the crowd long enough to give Jax a private smile, just the edge of his lip quirking upward.  Jax tilts his chin a fraction of an inch in the direction of Miriam, and he sees Dean follow Jax’s direction, sees him understand what Jax is asking, watches a resigned mask fall over his face.

 

And then he sees Dean’s face transformed by a big, wide smile that Jax knows is as fake as Biddy St. Joan’s fur stole.

 

Thankfully, Miriam doesn’t know that, and she’s on her feet an instant later saying, “I think it’s high time we find out what’s out there beyond our borders and the borders of our neighbors.  How are we ever going to rebuild America if we can’t even tell what’s still standing?”

 

“Wouldn’t we have heard from these places you’re planning to go if they were still on the map?”

 

Pastor Jurgess’ question is a good one, asked in a reasonable, peace-keeping tone, and a murmur of considered assent flows out like a wave from his position at the center of the crowded rows of seats.

 

Peri Winkler stands up nervously from where she’d been keeping a low profile in the first row and turns to face the gathered people.

 

“Uh, actually, through word of mouth we’ve already heard of fourteen towns and small cities that don’t have radio capabilities but do have people.  Other places have reported in about them.  Lockport, New York, for example, says that there’s a small outpost of survivors in Rochester, about sixty miles east of them.  The people in Rochester don’t have short wave capabilities—I’m not clear why, something about radioactivity?  Or maybe a pulse of some kind?”  Peri shakes her head as Lucas leans forward in his seat to touch her arm, reminding her to focus.  “Anyway, there are probably lots of places that didn’t get God’s message where people are just waiting to be discovered.”

 

Peri is a firm believer in the Voice of God, messengers of the divine who’d delivered news of survivors located in towns and cities all over America.  Of course, as the short-wave operator for Charming, she’d already had a lot of faith in voices coming from thin air.

 

The people seem satisfied by her explanation, and Jax can feel the tide turning in his favor.  For the most part, the folks who’ve lived in Charming all their lives are willing to give the Sons a lot of leeway.  Even if they didn’t particularly care for the club Before, they’ve learned from steady experience that Samcro stands between them and sure disaster.

 

And anyway, who’s going to stop them?  Half of Charming’s Army is lining the back wall of the assembly room, arms folded, eyes on Blue, their leader, waiting for his word.

 

No one’s in doubt what that word will be.

 

Eventually, as Jax knew he would, Max Steinburg gives in.  Gracelessly, petulance barely contained, he stands up and addresses the crowd, talking about duty and responsibility and sharing the load and a bunch of other horseshit that wears at their patience.  Before Steinburg’s halfway through his rant, people are shirting in their seats, buttoning their jackets, folding the notes they’d taken on details of the Expedition and tucking them away in pockets, the sound having a shuffling effect that mostly drowns out the climax of Max’s speech.

 

“Vote?” Ope asks Jax, and Jax scans the whole room one last time before saying, “All in favor?”

 

The “Ayes!” aren’t exactly thunderous, but they’re definitely louder and more numerous than the “Nays!”

 

As a grumbling minority pushes its way toward the rear exit, supporters crowd the dais at the front, asking Ope and Horse logistical questions, offering suggestions for places to explore, and congratulating them on their victory before the people.

 

Suddenly, Dean’s at his elbow, in that way he has of just appearing, as if from nowhere.  He leans toward Jax in a wash of hot breath that makes him shiver and says, “Good job not shooting anyone.”

 

Jax laughs and turns to kiss Dean, just a brush of the lips, a victory lap.  They don’t flaunt their relationship, don’t even wear rings, but now and again Jax enjoys reminding the people of Charming that this is who their leaders are, take ‘em or leave ‘em.

 

Later, trailing behind the last of the well-wishers, they emerge onto the front steps of the Town Hall, and Jax is startled for a moment to see that the sun is still shining.  It feels like they’d been in there for hours, like time had shifted subtly with the changing, once again, of their collective priorities.

 

“We should celebrate,” Bobby suggests.  Piney seconds it with a grunt, and Ope nods his agreement.

  
“Aye, let’s,” Chibs says.

  
“I’ll call J.C.,” Juice offers. 

 

“Rita can help,” Ope adds.

 

An hour later, they’re ranged around the grills, some of Bobby’s famous burgers sizzling in the charcoal flames.  J.C.’s serving beer and shots, Reno’s playing the guitar, Sack the harmonica, Mouse singing about Bobby McGee.

 

Jax is sitting on a picnic table, shoulder to shoulder with Dean, who’s got a home brew dangling from his fingers.  He’s talking to Grady, the ex-hunter, swapping increasingly bizarre stories that Jax is only half-listening to. 

 

He knows about Dean’s old life, Before, knows about the parts of it that brought Dean to Charming to begin with, understands that there are angels and demons and all kinds of evil shit.  He’s seen enough firsthand to believe whatever Dean has to tell him.

 

But he still can’t wrap his mind around some of it.  Though he’s mapped the scars on Dean’s body left by werewolves and vampires and harpies and ghouls, he can’t quite get a grip on the life Dean must have led, on what it must’ve been like to grow up always knowing that monsters are real.

  
Jax is no innocent, never has been.  He grew up fast and hard himself, learned his way around a knife and a gun, saw the worst a man can do to another man before he was even called a man himself.

 

And still, the shit that Grady is saying, the way that Dean is responding—it’s like another language, like a world just a degree off from his own.

 

Maybe he doesn’t want to understand it.  Maybe it reminds him too much of the parts of Dean he’ll never touch.

 

Or maybe he’s just a fuckin’ pussy.

 

Getting over himself, Jax puts away the feeling and focuses.  It takes him a minute to figure out that they’re talking about a “nest” of vampires Grady put down somewhere in Colorado.

  
“They were holed up in this old silver mine, three of ‘em, and coming down into town every now and again to snack on the populace.  It was dark as the inside of a witch’s belly in the mine, so even in broad daylight, they had the advantage of me.  But they’d apparently been turned sometime in the last century and hadn’t cottoned on to the new technology.  I used a magnesium torch to mimic daylight and blinded ‘em long enough to set ‘em on fire.”

 

“Oh, man, my dad always wanted one of those.  Never would tell me what for, not until I was older.”

  
“Let me guess—he told you the vamps were all wiped out, right?”

 

“Yeah!”

 

“Old hunter’s tale.  A bunch of us agreed to keep the vamps to ourselves.  Me.  Elkins.  Reinhart up in Sioux Falls.  Weren’t but a coupla dozen of ‘em, didn’t feel like sharing.”

 

“Yeah, well, you missed a few.”

 

“I heard about Elkins.  Poor S.O.B.  Was it true the old fox had Colt’s gun the whole time?”

 

“Hell, yeah.  Took out a few nasty sons of bitches myself with that gun.”

 

“I’d’ve liked to’ve seen that.”

 

So would Jax.  From the look on Dean’s face—nostalgia and sadness, a bittersweet gleam in his eyes—it was important to him, a time that shaped Dean into the man Jax knows.  The man he loves.

 

As if he’s heard Jax’s thoughts, Dean seems to realize he’s been excluding Jax and turns toward him, inviting him to join the conversation with a look.  But other than the gun—Jax recognizes the name “Colt” when he hears it, even if the majority of his own guns were made overseas—Jax’s experience doesn’t give him much to add.

 

“That’s one good thing about the apocalypse,” he hazards.  “No more vampires.”

 

Grady’s eyes shutter and Dean shifts a little beside him.

 

“What?”

 

Dean and Grady exchange an inscrutable look that pisses Jax off.

 

“What?” he asks again, a little more forcefully this time.

  
“It’s just…I don’t know about you,” Dean defers to the older hunter, “But I was running into two, three vamps at a time, all up through the middle states a year or so before…well, before I came here.”

 

Grady nods his head vigorously.  “Yep, had to’ve killed me a dozen, maybe a dozen and half, that last year.  Hell, I was holing up in another mine in Colorado that I’d cleared of vamps when your boy Chuck found me.”

 

At the name of the ex-prophet, Dean looks around.  “Where is Chuck, anyway?  I thought you called him.”

 

“I did,” Jax says.  “He said they’d come by when Wendy’s shift ended.”

 

Dean turns his attention back to Grady, who’s making motions for leaving.

 

Dean stands, offers the old man his hand, says, “Good talking with you.”

 

“Don’t be a stranger,” Grady gruffs, and Dean nods.  “I won’t.”

 

“Jax,” the old man says by way of farewell, and they exchange a firm handshake and promises to catch up about the manure disposal situation Grady’s taken charge of in the last few months.

 

“Man, the work of a king—all glamour,” Dean remarks when the old hunter has disappeared into the crowd.

 

“Yeah, hip deep in shit and sinking,” Jax answers, a variation on a familiar theme.  Dean bumps him with his shoulder and Jax bumps back, and just like that he’s tired of the party, tired of being surrounded by people who need or want to talk to him.

 

“You want to—,” he starts, eyes tracking toward the roof of the garage.

  
“Head up?” Dean finishes.  “Sure. Think they’ll let you?”  Dean nods in the direction of a half a dozen young men, all new arrivals to Charming, here for the last six months or so, and all anxious to join the charter.

 

Their spokesman is Chet Ryder, twenty-three, maybe twenty-four, tall, lean and acne-scarred with a fierce look and the deep black of prison ink peeking out from behind his white tee-shirt.

 

Jax had already made sure it wasn’t an iron cross or some other Nazi shit.  He wasn’t letting any of those assholes into Charming even if God did give them a pass.

 

But it wasn’t.  It was a phoenix rising from the curling black flames of a wicked fire.  It had to have taken hours and hurt like a motherfucker.  The kid is rightly proud of it and takes his shirt off at every opportunity, which is why Jax has seen it.

 

Naturally, no one calls him “Chet.”

 

“Feenie,” Jax says as the kid approaches with his would-be posse.  There’s no real trouble to be had in Charming, so the “gang” are kind of at loose ends, too old for the structure of The Hostel, too young to really contribute much except waste.

  
Besides, their collective skill set seems to run to boosting cars and street-fighting, neither of which are in much demand these days.

 

Hale is trying to bring along a couple of the younger ones, ones without any substantial prison ink and only the usual damage of abusive homes and absentee dads, but for all that he’s a punk, Feenie has a certain draw on the boys, and they’ve so far resisted Hale’s overtures.

 

“Jax,” Feenie drawls, eyes in an affected squint that makes Jax smirk.  Beside him, Dean shows less self-control, actually snorting and shaking his head.

 

At least it takes care of the squint as he checks out Dean, eyes tracking between Jax and his husband like there’s a joke here that he’s not quite getting.

  
His expression makes it harder for Jax to maintain his cool, and Dean’s choking laughter isn’t helping, either, but since there’s something he might need Feenie and his boys for, he has to try to be the diplomat.

 

Sometimes, being King of the World is just a pain in the ass.

 

“You heard about the Expedition?”

 

“Yeah,” Feenie says, ducking his head and pinching his lower lip, a nervous habit they’ve all noticed.  “That’s why I was coming to see you.  We were hoping you’d need some hired guns.  You know, to watch your back or whatever.  Out on the road.”

 

“Alright, good.  The teams for the Expedition have already been chosen.  They’re all set.  But we can use your help if you’re serious about it.”

 

Feenie nods eagerly, eyes sliding sideways to Dean, who’s stopped laughing and opted for the serious look he sometimes puts on when he wants to be left alone.

 

“With Horse and some of Blue’s and our guys going, we’re going to be short on nightly patrols.  We were hoping you’d take some training with Hale and then split up into teams to ride with veteran patrol members, learn the ropes.  You interested?”

 

“Does it pay?” Feenie asks.  Next to Jax, Dean makes a noise in his throat, and Jax hurries into his next words to try to forestall Dean’s less-than-tactful response.

 

“You know that’s not how we do things around here, Feen.  You work, you get a share of the living.  You don’t…”  He trails off, the threat apparent.  Already, Feenie and the gang had been caught twice trying to take food from The Hostel’s kitchen.

 

“Do we gotta go to training?”

 

He sounds so much like a whiny kid that Jax has to bite the inside of his cheek and think about the manure problem for a couple of seconds, long enough to keep from laughing in the kid’s face and ruining their newfound rapport.

“Yeah you do, dickwad.  There are procedures you have to follow.  Rules, you know?”  Dean’s voice is gruff, but there’s a certain affectionate impatience there. 

 

“Fine,” Feenie huffs, turning to look at the five guys ranged behind him.  The two youngest, Hale’s wannabe project, look especially excited about the prospect of having some official duties. He looks back to Jax, “Where and when?”

 

“Come with me,” Dean answers instead, jerking his head toward Hale, who’s talking to J.C. near the grill.

 

Jax sidles casually toward the ladder up to the roof, hoping no one notices him slipping away.  Dean catches up to him a minute later and they make good their escape.

 

“Hale cool with it?”

 

Dean nods as he settles onto “his” lawn chair.  They’d finally foregone the uncomfortable upended white buckets in favor of two cheap plastic recliners.  “Thrilled.  Practically dragged them all out to his Jeep to give them the route maps and manuals.”

 

Jax lights a spliff and hands it to Dean, who sucks in a lungful and eases back in the chair.  It’s cool on the roof, the breeze making the late afternoon sunlight all that much more welcome.  The sounds of the party are a little muffled from up here, thinned by space and wind.  They aren’t fooled into thinking they’re totally alone, but it’s a nice respite from the constant press of business down below.

 

“Today went better than you thought it would,” Dean observes.  It’s not a question.

  
Jax nods, breathes a tight, “Yeah,” out on the exhale.

 

“People really trust you.”

 

Jax pauses, mid-toke, to figure Dean’s angle, but his face is giving nothing away.

 

“Jealous?”

 

Dean shakes his head.  “Nah.”

 

But Jax knows it rankles Dean that people—even some of the Sons—still see Dean as an outsider.  For all he’s given up for the Club and the town, Dean doesn’t quite fit, something about him—maybe his scars, his car, the way he looks at the world through seen-it-all eyes, the way his hands heal, hell, maybe the fact that he’s fucking Jax—something marks him out as different.

 

Sure, he has friends—Sack spends almost as much time working on Dean’s car as he does working at the garage, and Juice finds an excuse at least twice a week to swing by for a beer.  Even Ope, who has serious sharing issues, recognizes that Dean is good for Jax.

 

Naturally, there isn’t a sweetbutt in the Club who doesn’t adore him.

 

And Blue trusts Dean as much as he does Jax when it comes to keeping Charming safe.

 

But for all that Dean has made a life for himself here, he’s somehow still not a part of Charming’s lifeblood.

“You sure about that?”

 

“I’m not _jealous_ of you,” Dean clarifies.  “I’m proud of you.”

 

This brings Jax up short.  It’s not like they don’t spend every the majority of their nights sharing via full body contact, nor are they sparing of pointed words in the throes of passion.  But generally speaking, Dean’s not comfortable with declarations of feelings beyond the obvious and acceptable.

 

Anger.

 

Hunger.

 

Lust.

 

Laughing until beer foams out his nose.

 

So it takes Jax a little while to formulate the response least likely to make things awkward or to back Dean off into defensive humor.

 

When he finally settles on something, he can see by Dean’s posture that the moment’s passed.

  
Still, he’s not a Son for nothing.

 

“Feeling’s mutual,” he says around a long, slow drag. 

 

Dean won’t look at him, engrossed in the endlessly fascinating security light buzzing to life at the edge of the roof closest to the ladder.

 

“I mean it,” he reiterates a moment later, smacking Dean’s near knee.  “You really hold shit together.  The house.  The hospital.  Sam.”  A beat, while he waits for Dean to notice the pause and bring his head up.  “Me,” he says then, softly.

 

Dean nods, clearly embarrassed but just as clearly pleased.

 

Then he clears his throat and says, “So Feenie—that your idea or Hale’s?”

 

“Little of both.”

 

“Seems like a good one.  Keep ‘em off the street, give ‘em something to do that makes them feel important.  Smart.”

  
“Like I said, it was a joint effort.  Hale’s not half-bad when you give him a chance.”

  
Dean’s snort suggests that last will happen when they’re playing hockey in Hell.  The only kind of law Dean recognizes is Murphy’s, and that’s mostly because he’s had so much intimate experience with it.

 

“Anyway, I figured they’d find a way to piss me off if we couldn’t keep them busy.”

 

“So you’re figuring Tuesday?”

Jax takes the subject change in stride, used to Dean’s deflection.  He nods and attaches a roach clip to the tag end of the spliff, offering it to Dean, who declines with a hand wave.

 

Shrugging, Jax sucks in the last of the sweet weed himself, waits for it to purl down into his lungs and curl out into his blood before he smiles, an excited, little-kid look, and says, “First thing Tuesday morning.  And I want to see ‘em off right, like fucking knights of the round table, you know?”

 

Dean smirks and tilts his head.  “That’s a little romantic for a big, bad-ass biker like you, isn’t it?”

 

“Fuck you,” Jax answers mildly.  “Arthur’s knights were fierce, man.  They slayed dragons and saved maidens and all that other cool shit.”

 

“I think you mean ‘slew,’” Dean corrects, amusement warring with the urge to harass Jax to within an inch of his currently stoned-out life.

 

“Whatever.  Point is, Ope and the boys deserve a big send-off, something to remember when they’re out there putting their asses on the line for us.”

 

“Hey,” Dean says then, raising his hands placatingly, “No arguments here.  Let’s figure it out.”

 

Jax shakes his head.  “No.  Put Bobby and J.C. on it.  They’ll do it right.”

 

“Bobby?”  Dean’s skepticism is evident.

 

“Yeah, he loves old books.  He probably knows the whole story by heart.  Who’d you think told it to me when I was a kid?”

 

Dean’s momentary surprise is replaced by something else, indefinable but definite.  Jax has seen that look before, but he doesn’t know what causes it, only that it makes Dean retreat inside himself, disengage in a way that no one would notice who doesn’t know him really well.

 

That means that only Jax is looking, and usually he doesn’t push.  Dean hates being pushed.  But this time…

 

“No one ever read stories to you as a kid?”

 

For a split second, Dean looks as though he’s seen something terrifying.  Jax has to fight the urge to whirl around in his chair and make sure there isn’t some ugly beast creeping up on him from behind.

 

Then Dean’s face slides into the charming neutrality Jax has come to sort of hate.

 

“Don’t,” he says shortly.  “Don’t hide from me.  Tell me.”

 

“It was the other way around,” Dean manages at last, after an awkward silence spanning a glacial age.  “And it was usually comic books.”

 

Jax gives a one-shouldered shrug, relieved that this, at least, is territory he’s been to himself once or twice.  “There are some great stories there, too.  Epic.”

“Yeah.  There was even one about King Arthur.  It was kind of lame—the coloring looked like a bad trip on the brown acid—but Sam liked it.  Said he liked how Sir Galahad was always trying to do the right thing, even when other people didn’t want him to.”

 

“How old was he?”

 

“I don’t know.  Five, maybe six.  Why?”

 

“Just wondered if he knew about what your dad did back then.”

 

Dean shakes his head.  “No, we managed to keep that from him till he was eight or nine.”

 

Sensing that Dean’s come to the end of his “sharing and caring” dance card, Jax says, “We should probably get back.”

  
“Yeah, Chuck and Wendy might’ve showed up.  I don’t like to leave Chuck down there alone for too long.  You know how nervous he gets.”

 

Jax can’t help but laugh.  Calling the ex-prophet “nervous” around the Sons is like saying Bobby sometimes gets a little peckish or Piney a little drunk.

 

Sure enough, they find Chuck backed into the only corner on the place, between a picnic table and a defunct ice machine, trapped there by Zeke, their newest prospect, and Chibs, his sponsor.

 

From the tenor of the conversation Jax can hear, they’re running a con on the little man.

  
“Get lost,” Dean barks at Zeke, who does as he’s told despite Dean having no actual standing in the club.  He’d learned early on that crossing Jax’s husband was stupid for a variety of reasons, most of them having nothing to do with Jax himself. 

 

Chibs turns to Dean with a wide, conspiratorial smile.  “I was jus’ explainin’ to Charlie-boy here about the way we initiate new auxiliary members.”

 

The Sons don’t have an auxiliary.

 

“Take it easy,” Dean advises Chuck, whose got a nervous tic half-closing his left eye with every third blink.  “He’s playing you, Chuck.  Jesus, you’d think an ex-prophet of the Lord would have a better sense of people.”

 

Chuck shrugs defensively and Jax almost feels sorry for him.

 

Then Chuck says, “You can’t go on the Expedition,” to Chibs, and turns his eyes to Jax.  “None of them can,” and any good feeling he might’ve had for the guy disappears in a wash of cold anger.

 

Who the fuck does Chuck think he is?  Friend of Dean’s or no, he’s got more balls than sense coming to the Club and threatening them all with—what?  Some half-baked “vision” he had while drunk off his ass?

 

Dean’s tone reflects some of Jax’s anger when he asks, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

 

Chibs has sensibly excused himself without a word.

“I had a—a vision?  I guess.  Or more like a dream, maybe?”

 

“Which was it, a vision or a dream?” Dean pushes, voice and eyes hard.

 

“I—I—I don’t know.  It wasn’t like…like Before.  It was… It was like I could see what was happening, like I was in the picture but not of it, you know?”

 

“No, I don’t know, Chuck, and you’re going to have to do better than that.  C’mon, man.”

 

Chuck nods, swallows convulsively, shuffles in place until he backs into the ice machine and startles.  “I don’t know.  It was…intense.  But not like Before.  I didn’t have a headache, for one thing, and I didn’t hear any voices or…static?  Just…  It was real clear.  I could see everything.  And what I saw…”

 

He trails off then, staring at his sneakers and fidgeting with his jacket zipper.

  
“Chuck!” Dean barks, and the smaller man visibly jumps. 

 

Chuck’s eyes, when he brings them to rest on Dean’s face, are huge in his face, enormous and swimming and terrified.  He shakes his head, slack mouth working but no sound coming out.

  
“I…I can’t,” he manages at last, like he’s choking on the words.  Rubbing his throat, he shakes his head harder and says, “I can’t talk about it.  The words won’t come.  All I know is there’s something out there that we aren’t meant to find.  You can’t go,” Chuck repeats, turning those horror-haunted eyes on Jax.  “Please.  It’s—you just can’t.”

 

“Give us a minute,” Jax orders, and Chuck looks infinitely relieved, ducking out from between Jax and the picnic table, tripping over the table leg, recovering at a skip and jogging off toward the bar that J.C.’s working.

 

Once more, he finds himself shoulder to shoulder on a picnic table with Dean, though this time their backs are to the partying crowd of Sons, the Army, and their well-wishers.

 

“You think he’s legit?” Jax asks, stomach sinking at the thought of calling off the Expedition on the word of a half-drunk, half-crazy refugee from Dean’s nightmare life Before.

 

“I don’t know, man.  He’s always been right before.”

 

Shit. 

 

“But why this?  Why now?  He hasn’t had a clear-cut vision since Before, right?”

 

Dean nods.  “Far as I know.”

 

“So why this Technicolor, surround-sound vision now?  And why can’t he tell us what he saw in it?  What’s that shit about?”

 

Dean’s got a considering look, lips slightly pursed, and Jax knows that look—knows it and hates it.  It means Dean thinks Chuck might be onto something.

 

“Sometimes…I mean, this was a different deal altogether, so I’m not saying it’s anything.  But sometimes, if there was something an angel or a demon wanted you to do, or maybe the Fey?  They have ‘em too.  Anyway, there’s this thing called a geis—like an order you have to follow, on pain of death—that would prevent you from saying something to someone else or from doing something counter to what you were supposed to.”

 

“You think Chuck’s got a geis?”

 

“He might be under one, yeah,” Dean answers, slowly, clearly caught up in thought.  “Though I don’t think we’ve got any Fey around here.  I mean, they were rare Before.  Now…I can’t think any of ‘em would still be hanging around.  So that leaves angels or demons.  And demons, far as I know, can’t get inside Charming.  So that leaves—.”

 

“Angels.”  Jax spits the word like he’s tasted something bad, and truth be told, the one time he had any truck with an angel, he hadn’t like the douchebag one fucking bit.  Self-important, arrogant snotrag.

 

“But this is all speculation, Jax.  I don’t know for a fact that Chuck had a vision or that there’s a geis on him.  Maybe he was drunk.  Or maybe he’d had a bad burrito.  Seems pretty slim to make a decision on, given what’s at stake.”  Dean’s voice is reasonable, and if he’s got any doubts about what he’s saying, he hides them well.

 

“And what it took to get to this point,” Jax adds, tired from even considering having to get approval for another mission if he called off this one on account of some nebulous, unnamed danger.

 

“So it’s full steam ahead?” Dean asks.

  
Jax nods, pushing off from the table and turning to find Chuck standing at the nearer edge of the crowd, Wendy at his side, the two of them in heated discussion, evident even at this distance by the woman’s violent hand gestures and Chuck’s contorted expressions.

 

They haven’t even reached the arguing couple when Wendy turns and says, “I’m so sorry, Jax.  I told him not to bother you with this nonsense.  Didn’t I, dear?”  She emphasizes the last word through gritted teeth, but Chuck doesn’t so much as flinch.

  
Instead, he meets Jax’s look head on and says, “I know you think I’m a drunk and a fool and that you only tolerate me because I’m Dean’s friend, but I’m telling you, whatever it was—vision, dream, hallucination—the message was clear.  You can’t let them go on this Expedition.  There’s something out there.”

 

“Is it The Truth?” Dean quips, winking at Wendy for effect.

  
The joke falls flat as Jax shoots him a frown, Wendy looks confused, and Chuck’s face registers deep disappointment.

 

If Dean’s ashamed of himself, though, he doesn’t show it.

  
“Look, Chuck, we’re not saying you’re crazy—though you could stand to lay off the sauce for awhile.  But it’s taken too much work to mount this Expedition for Jax to turn around and cancel it on your say-so.  You understand, don’t you?”

 

Chuck’s head droops and he nods, not looking up at any of them.  “It’s alright,” he says, voice muffled because he’s talking into his own chest.  “I’m used to being ignored.  Just call me Cassandra.”

 

Jax isn’t sure what that’s supposed to mean, but by Dean’s guilty expression, he guesses his husband knows.

  
“C’mon, man.  You have to see it from our perspective.”

 

“That’s just the trouble, Dean.  I do see it from your perspective.  I see everything from someone else’s perspective.  It’s the only perspective I have most of the time.  Don’t you think I’d just rather have an opinion of my own now and then?  Just approve or disapprove of you for no good reason instead of some world-ending, apocalyptic drama?  I can’t even take a shower without worrying that I’m going to see something in the steam!”

 

His voice has risen in volume and grown more shrill, so that he attracts the attention of Juice and Piney, who are at a nearby table working their way through monster burgers dripping with steak sauce.  Juice raises an eyebrow of inquiry and Jax waves him off.

  
“I’m sorry, Chuck.  Really, I am.”  And Jax actually sounds sorry.  He guesses that from Chuck’s point of reference, this whole prophecy gig must really suck.  “We’ll be careful, alright?  That’s the best I can do.”

 

“Fine,” Chuck answers, shoulders slumping with disappointment.  “You ready to go?” he asks Wendy then, who nods and mouths a silent “Sorry” at Dean and Jax before taking Chuck’s arm and leading him away.

 

Jax thinks about joining Juice and Piney, getting a burger and a beer, chilling out.  But he can tell by Dean’s posture that the other’s about done with company, and Jax isn’t feeling all that social—or hungry—either.

 

“You want to head home?” he asks, and though the sun is just starting to paint the horizon a threatening red, Dean gives Jax a tired smile and says, “Hell, yes.”

 

“We’re heading out,” Jax says to Bobby, who waves his greasy spatula in acknowledgment.  At the Impala, J.C. catches up to them, heels clattering through the gravel.  She’s got a brown paper bag already spotted with bleed-through. 

 

“Figured you’d need something for later,” she explains, managing to look both innocent and suggestive at the same time.

  
Predictably, Dean lays a big kiss on her painted lips, and Jax smiles at her and says, “Thanks, babe.”

 

“Anything for my favorite guys,” she answers, turning around and treating them to a view of her swaying ass as she picks her way back across the parking lot.

 

“Mmm-mmm-mm,” Dean remarks, ostensibly about the scent of the doggie bag’s still-warm contents.

 

Jax knows what he’s really talking about.

  
“Empty calories, man,” he reminds Dean, and Dean laughs.  “Yeah, for sure.  Got about all I can stomach right here,” he adds, laying a hand on Jax’s crotch before turning the key in the ignition and backing her out.

  
“Promises, promises,” Jax teases, laying his head back against the seat and closing his eyes.

  
He’s half asleep when they pull in their driveway, and it takes Dean’s teeth grazing his neck just below his ear to rouse him enough to get out of the car and into the house, where Dean continues his manner of encouraging Jax all the way to the bedroom.

 

Once there, Dean fulfills his earlier promise, taking Jax in his mouth with a ferocious gentleness that makes Jax hard and brings him off in a matter of minutes, Dean’s hand fondling his balls, long middle finger teasing his hole.

 

Exhausted and wrung out, sparks still scrolling across the inside of his eyelids, Jax mutters, “Rain check?” hoping Dean will get what he means.

  
“Sure,” Dean says distantly, sleep already dropping over Jax.  If Dean says anything else, he doesn’t hear it.

 

It’s the last solid sleep Jax manages until after the Expedition leaves on Tuesday.

 

They’re up half the night going over final plans with Ope, Horse, and the rest, double- and triple-checking fuel figures, food rations, water, all of it, wanting to be sure that they aren’t going to be left without the necessities.

 

The things they can’t plan for they talk about anyway:  Murders of bloodthirsty crows, for example; remnant bands of Scavengers…

 

“Dragons?”  Juice sounds like he might swallow his tongue.  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

 

Dean shakes his head solemnly and raises a hand in he might’ve intended to be the Boy Scout salute.  “Honest to god, dragons.  In Idaho.  Saw ‘em with my own two eyes about three, four years ago now.”

 

“Well, maybe they’re all gone now,” Sack offers hopefully.  “Maybe they were like Luci—.”  He stumbles to a stop, remembering too late why they don’t bring up the name.

 

Dean waves it off.  “Nah, that was something specific—demon-related.  I don’t know where the dragons came from, but it wasn’t biblical, least not as far as I could tell.”

 

“Well,” Bobby chimes in.  “Revelation includes dragon-like monsters.”

 

Dean shrugs.  “Guess that could explain it.  Anyway, just keep an eye on the sky.”

 

“Maybe an RPG?” Blue suggests, and Horse makes a note on his inventory. 

 

“I think we could fit it in the supply truck,” he says eventually, and they move on to the next subject.

 

Jax and Dean hit the apartment at the Club, ostensibly to get some sleep, but though he’s gritty-eyed and weak-kneed with exhaustion, he can’t sleep.

Neither can Dean, if his silence and stillness mean anything.  Dean’s a restless sleeper, plagued by nightmares on bad nights but noisy even on good ones, groaning and snorting, shifting his legs, changing positions.

 

If he’s quiet, he’s awake, Jax thinks.

 

He considers taking some momentary comfort in the distraction offered by Dean’s hands and his mouth, but that feels a little too much like he’d be using his husband.

 

When Dean at last rolls toward him, however, and slides a hand down his belly and into his shorts, Jax abandons his compunctions in favor of a quick and dirty handjob that leaves him breathless and boneless.

 

He returns the favor, Dean biting out Jax’s name in short bursts around his thrusting effort, and then they must actually fall asleep, because the pounding of a fist on the door startles them both, Dean rising from the bed like a slung stone, all lethal motion, Jax moving more slowly, stiff and logy, like he has the flu.

 

When they shuffle down the hallway toward the smell of coffee, the noise level in the Clubhouse is strangely muted, as though everyone is paying deference to a special visitor.  Jax half expects to see an angel leaning against the pool table.

 

Instead, he finds a chopped out ’73 HydroGlide parked in a clear space at the center of a crowd of familiar faces, all of them turned toward the gleaming chrome, the etched skeletal hands reaching from the pipes, the beloved reaper grinning out at them from the gas tank. 

 

Jax seeks out and finds Juice, says, “She’s beautiful.”

 

Juice beams and ducks his head, embarrassed, and mutters, “Finished her last night.”

 

“Juice, man, this bike is a thing of beauty,” Dean crows as he circles her, leaning in to look at the detail work along the chassis.  He might be a car guy to his dying day, but Dean recognizes a machine worthy of worship when he sees her.

 

“Thanks,” Juice says softly, smiling ear to ear.

 

Jax knows why the kid finished her before he left for the Expedition, knows the power of having something to come home to.  Truth is, Jax had hesitated to let Juice be one of the party, even if he’d been among the very first to volunteer when Ope had broached the subject a few months ago.  The kid hadn’t been quite right since his brush with death, hanging closer to the Clubhouse and quieter all around.

  
Dean had talked to him once, wouldn’t tell Jax what they’d talked about, claimed “Healer-Patient privilege,” which had pissed Jax off for about the four minutes it took Dean to show him how worried he was without letting anything else slip.

 

Then he’d just been worried, too.

 

Now, though, the kid seems easy in his skin, a light in his eyes Jax hasn’t seen there in weeks.  He tells himself that it’s not because the kid’s put his life in order and is heading out with the hopes of not returning.  Tells himself Juice is fine.

 

Giving Dean a sneaking glance, Jax sees that he’s talking low to Juice near the bar, where breakfast has been laid out buffet-style.  It doesn’t have the feel of something dire, and Jax lets himself hope for real.

 

Then, the outer door opens, a finger of bright dawn light piercing the dark hallway, followed by the heavy tread of Ope, who’s got Rita and Ellie with him.

 

They admire Juice’s bike and then grab breakfast, sitting at a long table laid out with clean white cloths.  As if that’s the signal they’ve all been waiting for, the rest of the Force wanders in in ones and twos, some with family, some alone, all wearing a lean and hungry look, eyes already skittering to distances Jax himself can’t see.

 

It makes him edgy, and he has to remind himself that they all wanted this, that every man and woman leaving them today is going out there as a volunteer, aware of the balance of risk and reward.

 

Still, it’s the part of being King that Jax hates the most, giving marching orders to good people who might not live to fulfill them.

 

After breakfast, there are speeches, predictably short and unpredictably clean, sanitized for the family affair the send-off has become.  While they’re laughing at one of Piney’s gruff jokes, Jax spends the time looking around at all of them, at the happy, hopeful faces turned up in laughter. 

 

Rita’s eyes are on Ope as he grimaces at his father’s sense of humor, Ellie’s eyes on her grandfather and mouth open in a pink-tongued, white-toothed laugh.

 

J.C. is whispering something into Chibs’ ear, and Chibs is nodding and smiling, wicked and wide.

 

Juice and Sack are gesturing toward the bike at the center of the room, engrossed in a friendly debate over something.

 

Even Horse is wearing a smile, a little bemused, as if surprised that he could make the expression in the first place, and a little wistful, like perhaps he wishes he had more such moments in his Spartan life.

 

Jax can usually sense what people are feeling, all part of his God-given gig as ruler of Charming, and the overwhelming sentiment in the room seems to be hope and fear in equal parts.  It catches at his throat, makes it hard to swallow, and as if he’s made a noise of protest at the sense, Dean turns to him, leaving Sam in mid-sentence to lean over and whisper in his ear, “Say something good.”

 

When Dean pulls away, it leaves a coldness along Jax’s jaw that makes him have to hide a shiver.  Chibs and Reno catcall as if Dean had just suggested something lewd, and Jax grins and shakes his head, rising reluctantly, as though dragged upright.

 

He doesn’t usually mind giving speeches, even though he’s shit at coming up with the right words.  This time, though, he can’t help but feel the weight his words will carry, how long they’ll ride with the men and women sitting there waiting to hear them.

 

Fuck it.  The best he can do is honesty.

 

“I’m not really sure what to say to you today.  I want to tell you that we’re proud as hell of every one of you.  That we’re proud to say we know you.  I want to tell you that what you’re doing is important, probably more than we can know right now, maybe more than we’ll ever know.  That what you’re giving up—what you might give up—won’t be taken for granted, not ever, not in Charming.  That we’ll make sure the world knows what you’ve done. And I want to say:  Come back safe.  We’ll keep a light on at the Gate, watch the road for your headlights.  And when you get back, we’ll party like there’s no tomorrow.”

 

“Unlike that time we partied when there actually wasn’t,” Dean adds, sotto voce, and everyone laughs.

 

It breaks the solemnity of the moment, breaks up the party, too, as members of the Force stand up, look at each other, start to gather near the hallway out of the Clubhouse.

 

Juice lingers by his bike, one hand on the seat, and Jax swings over to slap him on the back.  “We’ll take good care of her. Won’t let Piney ride her out of the yard.”

 

Juice’s alarmed gaze changes as he takes in Jax’s expression, eyes curling at the corners in laughter.

 

“Thanks, man,” Juice says.  And then, “I won’t let you down.”

 

Jax tightens a hand around Juice’s shoulder, pulls him into a lateral hug.  “I know you won’t,” he affirms, squeezing the kid’s shoulder and then cuffing him lightly on the back of the head.  “Get out there before they leave without you.”

 

As Jax steps out behind Juice, who’s the last of the Force to exit the Clubhouse, he sees what’s got to be half the town lined up on either side of the driveway out to the road.  There are women holding evergreen branches and dried flowers, men with their hats off and held over their hearts, like they’re waiting for the goddamned flag to pass.

 

Children shift restlessly, bouncing on the balls of their feet between adults who have eyes only for the party climbing into Escalades and Humvees and into the cab of the fuel tanker.

 

Ope is the last to go, kissing Rita and sweeping Ellie up in a monster hug before taking Jax in a fierce, back-slapping embrace, the blows so hard Jax’s heart stutters and jumps against his ribs.  “Take care of them,” Ope whispers roughly into Jax’s ear, and Jax nods against his best friend’s shoulder. 

 

“I will,” he promises, hating the words.  They feel like condemnation, like he’s letting Ope go for good.

 

A last quick kiss along Rita’s temple and Ope is behind the wheel of the lead gunboat, Reno on the fifty up top, one of Blue’s men, Jasper, riding shotgun.

 

The Escalade that follows them holds Grace and Chibs and a quarter of the ammo and the food.  Juice’s driving a second Escalade, Blue’s guy Beef next to him, and then comes the tanker with two of Blue’s men, Eben and Wood.  A third Escalade is behind that, two of Blue’s men—Sample and Stacey in it—and then the second gunboat, Tammy Rae on the fifty, eyes fierce and smiling, Sack driving, Edsel next to him already nattering. 

 

As the convoy rolls slowly down the driveway, the women throw their evergreen boughs beneath the wheels, and soon the sharp, clean scent of pine mixes with the heady blue diesel, a strangely complementary mix that makes Jax’s eyes water a little.  At least, that’s what he tells himself is causing it.

 

He raises a hand in a final salute as the second gunboat turns out of the driveway and onto the road.  There are more people lining the road all the way to the Junker Bunker, but Jax isn’t going to follow the convoy.  It’s for them the people have come out, not for him and those staying behind. 

“You want to go back inside, take a shower?” Dean asks.  He’s clearly not discussing getting clean, unless the way he licks his lower lip and smiles is some kind of new sign language for hygiene Jax is missing.

 

“Yeah,” Jax says, having to clear his throat to repeat it.  “Yeah.”

 

Dean leans in, says, “Good,” low and gravelly, and Jax feels himself hardening in his jeans.  Jesus, thirty-three and still popping wood like a teenager.  Must be Dean’s healing mojo.  He’s happy enough to believe that as Dean moves ahead of him through the growing light of morning and disappears into the shadow of the Clubhouse.

 

He’ll lose himself for a few minutes in Dean’s hot hands and the furnace of his mouth, feel his lover’s ass flex under his gripping fingers, know the way Dean’s groans vibrate against the head of his cock.  Taste Dean’s desire as he swallows it down.

 

He’ll still carry the burden of their world on his shoulders when he gets out, but he’ll be a little looser for the remembered pleasure and a lot more relaxed for having shared it for awhile.

 

*****

 

 _Out here, nothing is what it seems to be.  The odometer reads 1000, but it feels like ten times that, twenty times.  Like you’re never going to see home again, or like home doesn’t exist.  Everything you see—houses, trees, street signs, mailboxes—seems foreign and unreal, like you’ve been dropped into a movie set and are just waiting for someone to yell, ‘Cut!’_ (Letters 11:1-4)

 

Whittaker is twelve going on twenty, with great hair and an infectious grin that Dean can’t help but return when he comes through the door of the children’s ward and sees the kid’s face light up.

 

“How’s it hangin’?” Whit asks, and Dean answers with the expected, “Long and low.”

 

Whittaker’s answering laugh lights up his whole face, putting a little color into his pale cheeks, which only accentuates the greenish tinge to the skin under his eyes.

 

Whittaker’s got something wrong with him, but no one is sure what.

 

“Brought you something to read,” Dean says, tossing a stack of comic books on the bedcovers.

  
“Cool!”  Whit answers, pawing through them and mouthing the titles to himself.  “Awesome!” he reiterates, stacking them on his tray table and turning to look at Dean, who is leaning against the nightstand.

  
“How’d you sleep?”  
  


Sometimes the pain comes at night, makes nightmares seem like a mercy, because at least then he’s asleep for them.

  
Whit shrugs, playing it cool, but Dean can see the fear in the kid’s face, and he hates it.  So far, his mojo hasn’t been able to help Whit, which means either God doesn’t think the kid’s worth saving, or the kid can be saved without Dean’s help.

  
Still, Dean visits every day.  Whit’s parents didn’t make it through the Apocalypse, and he’d tagged along at ten years old with a group of religious nutjobs who eventually ended up laying siege to Charming and then got themselves fried at the Gate by an angry God who didn’t particularly appreciate hypocrisy.

  
Apparently, Whit hadn’t been guilty of that, since he’d survived the lightning storm.

 

He’d been living at The Home, and had quickly become a favorite of Sally and Alex, the couple who runs the orphanage for children under the age of sixteen.

 

A few weeks ago, a simple bruise had turned ugly and swollen, and they’d brought him in, fearing leukemia. 

 

But his blood seemed clean, though Tara hadn’t ruled out the possibility of some unknown-to-her pathogen.  Unfortunately, of the doctors who’d survived the Apocalypse, none in Charming had been epidemiologists or blood specialists.

 

Peri had contacted the other city-states in the Confederacy, but none of those few doctors had any information, either.

 

So for now, they were just trying to keep him comfortable and hoping to figure out the source of his pain and the strange bruises that would appear out of nowhere, as though he was taking a nightly beating from an invisible hand.

 

To be sure, Dean had swept the ward with EMF one night while Whit was sleeping relatively peacefully.  He’d found nothing.  Two subsequent nights, restless ones for the kid, hadn’t turned up anything, either.  Whatever was hurting Whit, it wasn’t supernatural.

 

Dean almost wished it were.  At least then he’d know how to fight it.  Maybe.

 

Still, the kid’s in good spirits most days, and they spend the time talking about comic books and cars—Whit wants a ’68 Pontiac GTO four-door when he’s old enough—and sometimes about girls.  Whit appreciates Dean’s experience with the opposite sex, and it doesn’t faze him at all that Dean is with Jax now.

 

“’s cool,” Whit had said the first time Jax had dropped by the ward to pay Dean and Dean’s favorite patient a surprise visit.  “You love who you love.”

 

Dean’s discovered a depth of wisdom in kids that he will never share with other people.  For one thing, he’d sound like a fucking Hallmark card.  For another, he kind of thinks of it as a perk of the job, so he’s selfish with it.  Anyway, he loves visiting Whit, even if watching the kid get thin and paler is harder than a lot of other things he’s had to endure in his life.

  
He figures if Whit can take the pain, the least Dean can do is not pussy out on him.

 

They’re ten minutes into an intense discussion of dual rear axles when an ambulance screams up at the emergency entrance around the side.  Before Dean can so much as take in a breath to say he’s got to go, Whit’s saying, “Take off,” not dismissively, just like it’s cool with him and he understands.

  
Dean would ruffle Whit’s hair, except he’s pretty sure that’s a major violation of guy code.  Instead, he pats the kid on the shoulder, just a brush, really, in place of the slap he’d give him if he wasn’t sure it would leave a hideous mark.

  
Then he’s jogging to the stairs and down them, along the hall to the emergency room entrance, skidding to a stop as Tara comes out of an examination room, already pulling her stethoscope from around her neck and listening to the town’s day-shift EMTs saying, “Woman.  Mid-thirties.  Assault.  Head trauma, some bruising of the thorax, difficulty breathing.”

 

He catches a glimpse of a bloodied cheek and one terrified, rolling blue eye, hears her voice, reedy with panic, say, “Monster.  Please, it was a monster.  Don’t let it get me,” before the woman is wheeled into the emergency ward and a privacy curtain is pulled to block his view.

 

A spike of adrenaline pushes his heart into his mouth, but Dean manages to swallow it before the EMTs have cleared the doors to the driveway.

  
“Hey,” he calls to one of them, Chip, he thinks it is, or maybe Kip.  “What happened?”

 

Kip—his badge clearly identifies him as Kip—gives Dean a suspicious once-over, and then the penny drops and his eyes go a little wide and he clears his throat and stammers through his explanation.

“She, uh, she was like that when we got to her.  A neighbor heard some screaming, went to investigate, found her like that and called us.  The victim was semi-conscious when we arrived, breathing labored, blood pressure erratic.  Somebody had punched her in the face and chest.  Looked like she’d put up a fight.  Kept saying there were monsters, that a monster did it.  I figured it was the head trauma.”

 

A few paces behind him, the other EMT—Rod—has stopped and is nodding convulsively in time with Kip’s words. 

 

“That your take on it?” Dean asks Rod anyway, just to be thorough.  
  
Rod bobs his head and warbles, “Yeah.  Monsters.”  By his expression, it’s clear Rod thinks the victim was a loon.

 

Hale enters then, face grim.  “What happened?” he demands, and Kip and Rod turn their attention to him, though they keep darting uncertain glances at Dean, like they’re not sure if they’ve violated some unwritten chain of command.

 

They repeat their report almost verbatim, Hale asking the same questions Dean would’ve gotten to if he hadn’t been interrupted by the sheriff.

 

Eventually, Hale dismisses them, and they make a grateful retreat.

 

“What’s your part in this?” the sheriff asks Dean then.

 

“Innocent bystander?” Dean tries, shrugging.  
  
“You just happened to be in the ER when she came in?”

 

Another shrug.  “Heard the ambulance, thought I might help.”

 

Over the sheriff’s face there is a momentary expression as though he’s just smelled a fart but is too polite to give it away.  Then he’s got the cop-face on once more.

 

Dean is used to skepticism—about his first profession and his latter day turn as a healer—and he’s never particularly liked Hale, so it’s not like the lawman’s opinion really matters all that much.  But since Dean’s got a feeling about this case and doesn’t want to antagonize the sheriff or make him suspicious of Dean’s motives, he keeps his first reaction—telling him where to shove it—to himself.

 

Instead, he says, “Looks like I won’t be needed after all,” and starts to turn away.

 

“Keep this to yourself,” Hale orders, and Dean stiffens at the tone of command.  He takes that tone from only one man, and this man is not Jax.

 

Reining in his temper, Dean sketches a mock-salute at Hale and says, “Yessir,” insincerely, not waiting for Hale’s reply.

 

Back at the children’s ward, he finds Whit asleep, comic book open across the boy’s thin chest.  Dean slides it out from under his hands, closes it, puts it on the tray table within easy reach, and leaves the ward.

He’s at loose ends—no patients to see, nothing to do but head home.  He wants to talk to the victim of the attack, but he can’t do it while Hale’s hanging around trying to do the same thing.  Dean wants to talk to Tara, too, but there again, he’s got Hale in the way.

 

Resigning himself to a little after-hours snooping, Dean heads home, expecting the sight of Sam buried waist-deep in the ‘88’s guts but surprised to see Jax there with him, shooting the breeze and handing the kid a tool when Sam asks for one.

 

“Give up on being King, decide to return to your roots?” Dean asks.

 

Jax shakes his head.  “No, I’ve got shit to do later on.  Just figured I’d swing by, pick up a couple of those books you wanted to give Grady.  I have to head out to the farm for an hour or two, talk manure.”

 

“You got a minute before you head out?” Dean asks, and Jax nods, face changing from expectation of a quickie to serious concern when he takes in Dean’s expression.

  
“Hey, Sam, take a break, okay?”  Dean doesn’t like the kid that far into the engine with no one to spot for him.

  
Sam knows the rules and obeys with relative grace.  “Yeah, okay.  But I’ve almost got the last bolt free, and—.”  
  
“Sam,” Dean interrupts.  It’s not harsh or even unkind, and the kid responds with a shrug and casually concealed disappointment.

 

“Can I make a fire?”

 

“Sure,” Dean says.  “There’re hot dogs in the fridge if you want to roast a couple.”

 

That seems to placate Sam, and he heads inside.

 

Dean and Jax follow a few minutes later, after they hear the back door slam.

 

“What’s up?” Jax asks, sitting down at the kitchen table and opening the beer Dean had offered him.

 

“Woman was brought into the ER about an hour ago,” Dean begins, going through the whole story, from the woman’s wild words through Kip and Rod’s report and right on to Hale’s attitude.

 

“Guy’s a douche personally, but he’s decent cop,” Jax reminds Dean for what might be the eighteen-hundredth time.

  
Dean rolls his eyes.  “Whatever.  Point is, I need to talk to the victim without Hale around.  And to Tara.  And you could probably help me with that.  Some of it, anyway.”

 

“You want me to sweet-talk Tara into violating doctor-patient confidentiality?”

 

“If anyone can do it,” Dean starts, over-the-top flattery leaving an oil slick on the air.

 

“Shut up,” Jax says fondly, taking a long pull of his beer.  “Fine.  I’ll talk to Tara.  And try to run interference so you can get in to see the crazy lady.”

“She might not be crazy,” Dean says, a little hurt that Jax immediately assumes the most mundane explanation.

 

“Monsters, Dean?”  Jax’s tone suggests that Dean is reaching.

 

Dean shrugs defensively and lets it go.  He knows that Jax isn’t comfortable with certain aspects of Dean’s past, but he’d hoped—maybe foolishly—that Jax would keep an open mind this early on in the game.

 

“Far more likely it’s a person doing this, which is bad enough,” Jax reminds Dean, and Dean relents a little in his head, easing up on his disappointment in Jax’s reaction.

  
After all, Jax has responsibility for all of Charming.  The idea of one of her citizens going around beating the ever-loving shit out of women is a frightening enough prospect without Dean throwing the boogedy-boogedy element into it.

 

Jax finishes his beer, grabs that quickie—blow jobs rough and fast up against the inside of their closed bedroom door—and heads out, Dean jogging out to Jax’s bike with the books he’d forgotten.

  
“Thanks, dear,” he says, giving Dean a wicked smile all out of synch with the Donna Reed tone.

 

From next door, they hear, “Jesus, would you two get a room?  You’re bringing down housing values.”

 

Dean catches Liz’s teasing smirk as she finishes dumping a dead houseplant behind the bushes off of her porch and turns to head back inside.

  
“You’re just jealous.”

 

She gives him a different kind of smile over her shoulder and says, “Damn straight I am.  Have you ever seen yourselves?”  She makes a fanning motion and then waggles her ass on the way through the door.

  
“That is one seriously hot woman…” Jax starts.

  
Dean blows out a breath.  “Yeah.  Yeah, she is.”

 

“Hey,” Jax starts, and Dean turns to find a serious look on his husband’s face, the sort of look he’s learned to dread.

  
He stops Jax’s question with a deep, wet kiss that still tastes of the seed he’d swallowed.

 

When he pulls away, the look has gone, and Jax is smiling again, a gentle look that makes Dean deeply uncomfortable.

  
As if sensing what he’s doing to Dean, Jax snorts and pulls on his helmet, kicks up the stand and starts his bike. 

 

“Later,” Jax says, loud enough for Dean to hear him over the roar of the engine.

 

“Don’t get dead,” Dean answers automatically.  They haven’t said it in awhile, not since the last big bad thing was trying to destroy all they’d worked so hard to build.  Dean sees Jax hesitate as he’s rolling down the driveway, but then he picks up speed, guns it, and is gone, only fading noise and a thin film of exhaust to show for his mid-day visit.

 

Back inside, Sam is waiting in the kitchen with an uncharacteristically serious look on his face.

 

 _Must be the day for that expression_ , Dean thinks, but all he says is, “What’s up?”

 

“You and Jax fighting?”

 

“What?  Why would you think that?”

 

“You’ve got those lines around your mouth that you get when you’re pissed about something.”

 

Dean resists the urge to put a hand to his mouth and feel around for grooves.

 

“We’re not fighting,” he assures Sam.  The kid might’ve gotten attached to Dean first, might look up to him like a surrogate for the big brother he’d had to watch die, but he’s also got a major hero crush on Jax.  Dean doesn’t want to worry the kid over his own insecurities.  “I’m just trying to work a couple of things out, that’s all.”

 

And this is another way in which Sam is nothing like Dean’s actual brother had been.  He accepts Dean’s half-assed explanation with a satisfied nod, slides from his chair, and asks, “You want to help me with that last bolt?  It’s a real bitch.”

 

“Language,” Dean intones automatically, Sam mimicking the word right along with him.

 

They spend the rest of the afternoon cursing the goddamned mother-fucking son of a bitching bolt until at last, around supper time, just as he hears Jax’s bike approaching, the fucking thing at long last gives.

 

“Halle-fuckin’-lujah!” Dean hollers, waving the greasy wrench around in his hand as Sam does an impromptu victory dance with the bolt cupped over his head in both of his.

 

Jax gives them a quizzical look as he dismounts and drops his helmet over the handlebar.

 

“Got the fuckin’ thing off,” Sam crows, cradling the chewed-up bolt in his filthy hands.

 

Neither of them bothers to correct his language.  Certain gearhead experiences require swearing, and this is one of them.

 

“Now what?” Jax asks, though he, of course, knows.  Dean feels a warm spot in his chest at the way Jax always includes Sam, makes him feel like he’s welcome and a part of the Club and their family.

 

“We were hoping to borrow an engine hoist from the garage,” Sam wheedles.

  
“Yeah, alright,” Jax answers, Sam already hooting, “Al-right!” as he raises his voice to add, “But only if you promise to keep clear of Feenie and his boys.”

 

Like that, the joy in Sam’s movements drains away and he goes still, eyes shuttering.  Dean recognizes that look and shoots an annoyed glance at Jax, who should know by now that the direct approach never works.

“You been hanging with those douchebags?” Dean asks, careful not to sound accusatory but just curious.

  
Sam shrugs with one shoulder, expression growing mulish.

 

Dean avoids the obvious next question—“Why?”—and skips right to, “They treating you okay?”

 

Sam looks up, eyes wary but brighter.  “Yeah, they’re alright.”  He doesn’t sound excited or enthusiastic, just matter-of-fact.

 

“You ever take out mailboxes or set garbage fires?”

 

There’d been some vandalism lately that Hale was pretty sure was down to Feenie’s crew, stupid juvenile shit more annoying than dangerous.  Still, if Sam’s mixed up with the older guys, there’s got to be a reason.

 

“No,” Sam asserts, and he sounds a little offended that Dean would even ask.

 

“Good.  So what do you do when you’re with them?”

 

Sam huffs out an impatient sigh and rolls his eyes.  As mature as he is for his age, Dean sometimes forgets that he’s still an adolescent.

 

“I don’t ‘hang’ with them.”  Dean can practically hear the air quotes.  “It was once.  One time.  _They_ came to _me_. Kept asking me questions about you and Jax and the Sons.  But I didn’t tell them anything,” Sam hastens to add as Jax takes in a breath to interrupt him.  “And I’m not going to.  They’re total loser wannabes.”

 

Sam would know from real gangs, his brother having run with a Scavenger crew before the leader of that gang had essentially curb-stomped him, sans curb.

 

“Glad to hear it,” Jax says then.  “I told Hale it was bullshit.”

 

At Jax’s approval, Sam’s shoulders, tensed before in a defensive hunch, relax into his usual, cocky posture. 

 

“Hale’s a douchebag, too,” Sam states.

 

Neither of them calls the kid on his language.

 

“I’m meeting Tara at the hospital at eight, when she gets off her shift,” Jax tells him, moving the conversation along.

  
“And the victim?”

 

Jax doesn’t answer right away, instead giving Sam a significant look.

 

Sam rolls his eyes but goes into the garage to wash up without a word of protest, tucking the defeated bolt into his pocket as he goes. 

 

When they can hear the faucet running, Jax gives Dean his answer.

“Brenda McClellan.  Refugee.  Been here a year and a half.  No family, works maintenance at the Town Hall and the Sheriff’s Office.  Tara said she was awake and responsive, so you can talk to her if you can find a way around the deputy at the door.”

 

“Why the guard?” Dean asks.

 

Jax shrugs.  “Hale seems to think it might’ve been work-related.”

 

“Why?  Was she attacked at the Sheriff’s department?”

 

“Nope.  He wouldn’t say much to me about it.  Seemed like he had a bug up his ass—bigger than usual,” Jax adds before Dean can point out the obvious, which is that Hale always has something up his ass.

 

“He’s asked Blue to step up patrols, too.  Good thing Feenie’s got a gig with him, or he and his boys would end up on the PL.”

 

The “Punitive Labor” crew is Charming’s answer to productive probation, since they have neither the manpower nor the resources to run a prison for the criminally-inclined.

  
Of course, anyone who breaks the law in a big way is exiled, which is effectively a death sentence unless the asshole is especially self-sufficient.

 

Grady runs the PL crew when there’s anyone in the program.  Lately, things have been quiet, mostly because the boys who’d attacked and almost killed Jax had been considered too dangerous for the PL, which was only semi-supervised.  They were being housed in lock-up at the cop shop for the foreseeable future, a notable exception to the otherwise clear rule.

  
Dean had wanted to kick their asses out of Charming, but Jax had insisted that they were too young for such a final punishment and that with some real work they could be saved.

 

Jax had a soft spot for lost causes, and Dean had a soft spot for Jax, so Jax had gotten his way.

 

Hale had reported to Jax only last week that the ringleader of that murderous little posse had broken down in tears during group therapy with a shrink from St. Thomas.

 

Dean hadn’t bought it, but Jax seemed satisfied that they were making progress.  Sometimes Dean worried that Jax had a blind spot where his own people were concerned.

 

He wondered if that blind spot was about to be a problem.  If Brenda had, in fact, been attacked by a human being and that person was someone Jax had known all his life, it was going to be hard for Jax to let the gavel fall.

 

Dean realizes Jax is waiting for him to say something.  “Sorry.  I was just—“  _borrowing trouble_ —“thinking about the attacker’s motives.”

 

“We eating?” Sam calls from the door, and Dean calls back, “Yeah.”

 

“More stew?” Jax teases as he follows Dean into the house.

  
“Chili,” Dean answers, giving Jax a smirk.  Bobby makes a mean chili, hot enough that even Jax, bad-ass extraordinaire, sometimes tears up over it.  Since Bobby knows this, he makes sure to keep Dean in a steady supply of it.

 

“I’m going to kill him,” Jax promises, as he does every time he’s forced through the hell of this particular meal.

 

“Bobby’s chili?” Sam asks as the couple makes their way into the kitchen.  He’s already set out bowls, spoons, and glasses and taken it upon himself to pour the chili into a pot and set it on the stove to be reheated.  “My favorite!”

 

Dean can’t help the mocking laugh that leaves him then and only laughs harder when Jax turns to snap him on the ass with a kitchen towel.  Sam watches from the stove, pretending to be grossed out by their affectionate wrestling but clearly happy to be included in the little tableau.

 

Dinner done, Sam takes his leave, teasing Jax about his red face and watering eyes, pausing only long enough to make sure he’s welcome the next day.

 

No matter how often Dean tells Sam he can come anytime—the kid’s had a key since a week after Jax moved in for good—Sam always asks.  Dean imagines that Sam’s waiting for the day when Dean or Jax gets sick of him, tells him he can’t come around.  Dean can relate, remembers clearly all the times he got attached to something only to have to watch it diminish and then disappear in the rearview.

 

“Sure, Sam.  Come by after school and we’ll go see Sack about getting that hoist set up in the garage.”

 

“Cool!  Thanks, Dean.  See ya, Jax.”

 

And then he’s out the door, no more than the whirr of bike wheels swallowed up in the sound of a passing car.

 

The hospital is quiet when they arrive, most of it dark, conserving power, only the necessary lights and machines humming softly. 

 

Dean’s footsteps sound loud in his ears as he strolls casually toward Brenda McClellan’s room, hoping that the diversion Jax has arranged happens before the deputy catches sight of him.

 

Distant shouting reaches his ears, one floor down and a few rooms away from where the deputy stands, shifting his weight with indecision before pulling the walkie from his belt and muttering into it as he jogs for the stairs. 

 

Dean watches him go from around the corner and then sprints for Brenda’s empty doorway.

 

She’s propped up in the bed, eyes staring dully at the television, which hasn’t shown a live program in more than three years, and she looks up hopefully when Dean walks in, maybe expecting the deputy, who it seems she must know by her welcoming expression—what expression he can see around the bruises. 

 

Whatever did this to her, it was brutal and thorough.

 

Her expression morphs to fear in a heartbeat as she realizes it’s not the law at all.

  
“Who—who’re you?”  She asks, voice quavering on the last note.

“It’s okay.  I’m Dean.  Dean Winchester.  I’m—.”

 

“Jax’s husband!”  Suddenly, she’s no longer afraid, which is, on the one hand, gratifying.  On the other hand, Dean still isn’t used to being identified as someone else’s something.

 

He’s sort of used to being a name all on his own.

 

Still, you don’t get to be the King of the World’s main squeeze without earning some associated perks, and if it eases Brenda’s mind to make the usual connection, Dean’s okay with that.

 

“Yeah.  Uh, hi.”

 

He shakes her weakly offered hand carefully, noticing the defensive wounds on her fingers, the bandages on her arms that indicate she fought back against whatever—or whoever—attacked her.  Her head is bandaged over one temple, and he can tell by the way she holds herself, a familiarly careful posture, that she’s got bruised ribs, at the very least.

 

“I know this is a difficult time for you and you’re probably not feeling very well, but I wondered if you wouldn’t mind answering a few questions.”

 

In his head, it had sounded good, but out loud it sounds lame.  With a pang, Dean remembers how good his little brother had been at charming information out of scared, wounded victims.  For some reason, they’d always found Dean a little intimidating, but not Sam.  When he’d softened those big, expressive eyes of his, even the most terrified witness would spill her story as if Sam was doing her a favor and not the other way around.

 

It’s not even in the top one hundred reasons Dean misses his brother, but it still forces a tight breath out of his throat.

 

“Is this for the Sons, so they can go after the thing that hurt me?”

 

He has to be careful, here.  He and Jax had talked about representation.  Dean couldn’t really claim the protection of Jax’s position if he was going to be interfering in Hale’s official investigation.  The best he could do is let her think he was working on behalf of Jax and the Club.

 

So he settles for a noncommittal sound and a redirection, Winchester style.

  
“Can you tell me what did this to you, Brenda?”  He chooses his words with care and sees the second she hears what he’s actually asking.

  
“You—you mean, you believe me?  That it was a monster?”

 

Dean smiles, and this time it’s genuine.  He’s had plenty of experience fielding astonished relief.  “Let’s just say it’s not the first time I’ve hunted evil things.”

 

She takes a quick breath and breathes out, “Oh, of course.  Of course.  You killed the devil.” 

 

All this time, and he still can’t hear those words without flinching, though he’s managed to keep it to a tightening around his eyes and a tension in his hands, which are clutching a pen and little notebook like the ones he and Sam used to use on jobs Before.

The devil was wearing his brother’s skin when Dean killed him.  It’s still a sensitive point with him.

 

“So what did you see, Brenda?  What did this to you?”

 

“I—.  I was in the kitchen, making some tea.  It was about seven o’clock at night, dark, you know, this time of year.” 

  
He nods encouragingly because it seems like she needs it.

 

“I was just getting a mug down out of the cupboard when I thought I heard someone come in the room.  You know how you can tell someone’s behind you even if you didn’t really hear them or they didn’t say anything?  That sense you get that there’s someone there?”

 

“Sure.  Hair stands up on your neck,” he answers helpfully.

 

“Yes! And, well, I turned around and there was a—.  You’re sure you won’t think I’m crazy?  Everyone else does.”

 

If he had more time, Dean might find her neediness endearing.  As things stand, though, he figures the deputy will only be distracted by Jax’s little drama—brought to St. Thomas by the letters SAMCRO—for so long.

 

“Trust me.  Nothing you say will surprise me.”

 

“Well…I think it was a yeti.”

 

Okay, he was wrong.

 

“A yeti?”  He tries—he really does—to keep the skepticism from his voice, but apparently, he’s unsuccessful.

 

“I knew you wouldn’t believe me,” she says, subsiding back on her pillows with a visible wince that wrings a sympathetic tic out of Dean, too. 

 

“No, hey.  Look.  It’s just…not what I was expecting to hear.  When you say ‘yeti,’ do you mean…?”

 

“Abominable snowman.  Big white hairy giant monster.  Yeah.  Yeah, that’s what I mean.”

 

Her words are tired, as if just having to repeat them is draining the life out of her.  He’d better make this fast for more than the obvious reason.  Brenda might seem pretty bright-eyed, but she’s definitely hurting.

 

Instinctively, because it’s what he does, Dean wraps his hand gently around her wrist, feeling for her pulse there through the thin gauze of her bandages.

 

She resists with a little tug for a moment and then seems to sense that he means her no harm.

  
He keeps the hand there, laying the notebook and pen down on the bed, and looks her square in the eyes, waiting until he feels her heartbeat slow before he says, “Tell me what it looked like.”

 

When she’s done, Dean’s half-convinced they actually have a yeti loose somewhere in Charming.  Never mind that the climate of northern California is all wrong for a creature indigenous to the high Himalayas.  Never mind that John Winchester had reported to Dean when Dean was eight that Big Foot was a hoax.

 

Her description seems to fit except for one big honkin’ but.

 

God doesn’t let monsters in to Charming.

  
 _At least_ , Dean amends silently as Brenda’s eyes start to drift closed and her last words slur off into soft breathing, _God doesn’t let the human monsters in_.

 

Maybe the other kinds are welcome.

 

Which is ridiculous, of course.

 

That’s exactly Jax’s reaction when Dean meets him at the Impala ten minutes later.  After filling Dean in on Brenda’s injuries—nothing he hadn’t guessed and nothing unusual—Jax turns to the more immediate matter.

 

“No way God’s gonna let a giant snow monster roam around Charming, Dean.  No way.”

 

“I agree,” he says gruffly, sliding behind the wheel as Jax settles into the passenger seat.

 

“And besides, someone would have seen it by now.”

 

“I thought of that, too,” Dean answers, trying to hold onto his patience.

 

“Then it’s not a monster, plain and simple.  Brenda’s nuts.”

 

Dean shakes his head.  “It’s _not_ that simple, Jax.  It could be a shapeshifter or a skinwalker.  Could be some sort of hallucination spell or bad mojo or a trickster or a djinn fucking with her head.  I can think of half a dozen explanations for what she saw off the top of my head, without even checking Dad’s book, and none of them include an actual snow monster.”

 

“I can’t believe we’re actually going with ‘snow monster,’” Jax observes then, and Dean can’t help the short, hard laugh it forces out of him.

 

“Yeah, welcome to my world,” he answers.

  
There’s a pause then, long enough that it catches Dean’s attention, draws his eyes off the road and onto Jax, who is staring through the windshield but seeing nothing that’s visible to Dean’s eyes.

 

“What?”  He asks at last when he realizes Jax isn’t going to fill in the blanks.

 

“I was thinking just the other day, when you were talking to Grady at the cookout, that no matter how hard I tried, I’d never be a part of the world you came from Before.  And now…”

 

“Now we’re talking about monsters,” Dean finishes quietly, a familiar but unwelcome weight settling in the region of his heart.  He feels just a little bit like he did when he had to tell Sammy that monsters were real.

 

Which is stupid, of course.  It’s not like Jax is some little kid.  He’s seen some serious shit.  Angels.  Demons.  Messengers of God.  Demon-infected freaks and the Devil himself.

 

Still, for as much as Dean occasionally misses the life he had Before, when his brother was still alive and their worst problem was an expired fake credit card, Dean never wanted to bring this part of his life home again.

 

He feels like apologizing, but he doesn’t.  If he starts taking blame for this shit, he’ll never stop.

So instead, he says, “Could be a guy in a yeti suit.”

 

Jax snorts, says, “That’s a hell of a fetish,” and Dean laughs a little in turn.

 

In unison, they grow quiet with the disturbing images Jax’s words raise.

  
When Dean’s shaken it off, he says, “What’s next?”

 

He can feel Jax’s look.  “Why are you asking me?  You’re the monster expert.”

 

“And you’re the King of the World, remember?  I can’t just go around stepping in Hale’s investigation.  He’ll be raining shit down on you before you can say ‘due process.’”

 

“Yeah, alright.  Give me a little time to think about it.  Maybe talk to Blue, see what he says.”

 

Blue thinks Dean is crazy.

 

“There’s no such thing as the abominable snowman.”  Blue looks like the words taste bad as he says them, and the look he gives Dean is withering, as if Dean has deeply disappointed Blue’s expectations of him.

 

“We’re not saying there is, Blue,” Jax answers smoothly.  “We’re just saying something might be out there besides a guy in a funny costume.”

 

Costume is the going theory.  In fact, it’s got the most money riding on it in the betting pool Piney started that morning, the day after the attack, when word got out about what Brenda was claiming to have seen.  The chalkboard is up over the bar, and Dean’s been watching it fill all morning.

  
The information didn’t come from Dean, and he’s pretty sure Hale wouldn’t have talked, either, which can only mean one of two things:  Either Brenda herself shared her story, or they’ve got a leak at the hospital.

 

The latter’s going to piss Tara off, Dean thinks, bringing his attention back to the conversation between Jax and Blue.  The head of Charming’s Army is reacting about the way Dean had expected he would.

 

Blue hadn’t been in Charming when the world had failed to end, when Dean had disappeared in a column of flame and taken the Devil down with him.  He’d arrived in town while Dean was gone, resurrected hundreds of miles away in the desert, making a place for himself in history that he’s still not comfortable acknowledging.

 

Anyway, he hadn’t expected Blue to get on board, and neither had Jax.  He’d told Dean he wanted the big man’s ideas about how to circumvent Hale without causing a pissing match over territory, but in fact, Dean can tell Jax really wanted to hear from a rational source that there isn’t a monster stalking the people of Charming.  One good night of sleep and the bright sun of a new day had realigned Jax’s shifting worldview. 

  
Dean’s seen it before, knows it for what it is.

 

But it still hurts.  More than he’s willing to admit.  Dean shifts in his seat and says, “Hey.  Look, I don’t really care if you believe me or not.”  He directs this at both of them equally, holding up a hand when Jax looks like he’s going to protest Dean’s assessment.

 

“What matters is giving me time to do my thing.  If I’m wrong and this is just some ordinary whack-job, fine.  Great.  Whack-jobs we can handle.  If I’m right, though, and this is something else, something…supernatural…then I’m the best person to track it down.  Either way, what harm is there in having one more hunter on the trail of a vicious monster, whether that monster’s human or otherwise?”

 

Blue, ever practical, finally nods at Dean’s reasoning.  “I’ll see if I can’t get you deputized, but it’s a long shot.  Hale doesn’t like you.”

 

Dean and Jax laugh at the same time, and it’s the same laugh—humorless and dry, maybe a little bitter.  This they share in common:  They’ve both always been outlaws.

 

Blue’s definition of law is a little different than theirs, but he appreciates the sentiment anyway, judging by his smirk.  “Barring that, I guess you’re going to have to sneak around, at least until your theory or his is confirmed.” 

 

The big man’s tone is mostly neutral, but Dean can hear in it his utter lack of faith in Dean’s “theory.”

 

 _Whatever_.  He’s faced this kind of skepticism before.  It’s just not usually from people he considers friends.

 

And family.

  
 _Whatever_ , he repeats to himself.  _You’ve got a job to do, so do it.  
_  
Slapping the table, he rises, which gets Blue and Jax on their feet, too.  Blue offers his hand, and they have a round of shakes, and then he’s gone, saying something about putting Feenie and his crew through “calisthenics.”

 

Jax laughs.  “Poor bastards.”  
  


“Couldn’t have happened to nicer jackwads,” Dean agrees.

 

“So what are you planning to do today?” Jax asks, and it might be a casual question except for how it’s really not.

 

“I thought I’d enter the spirit realm and summon a daemon to guide me down the elder paths,” he says with a straight face.

 

“Fuck you,” Jax says affectionately, cuffing Dean on the back of the neck and pulling him in for a kiss.

 

From the bar comes a delighted little sound, and they turn together to see J.C. there looking doe-eyed and mushy.

  
“Fuck you, too,” Jax adds.  J.C. gives him her porn-star smile and toodles her fingers at him.

 

“Can I help it if you two are adorable?” she asks, innocent like Betty Boop, all boobs and posture.

 

Dean can’t help but smile wide at that.  J.C. has a knack for reminding him of the good things in this world, even when the rest of his life is doing its best to convince him that there’s nothing but shit and blood.

 

“I’m going to the hospital, as usual.  And then, if I have time, I’m going to do what I do.  Investigate.  Ask questions.  Gather evidence.  Research.  If I decide to mess with the forces of darkness, I’ll be sure to file for a permit with the Town Council first.”

 

“Fine.  But be home by ten or you’re grounded.”  It’s funny.  It’s supposed to be funny.  And Dean laughs, a little breath of escaped air, and when Jax kisses him again, deeper, like he’s apologizing for the look Dean’s pretending not to wear, he feels Jax’s tongue all the way to his cock, despite that Jax keeps it PG-13 for the sake of Bobby, who’s just come in from a run to Jetts’ grocery.

 

“Later,” Dean says, heading for the door, trying not to make it look like he’s running away.

  
“Don’t get dead,” Jax calls after him.

 

Dean pauses, thinks about turning around, but he’s afraid if he looks at Jax, he’ll relent on this course of action, pretend it’s some bent guy with a fetish for fur, and forget what he knows in his gut and his bones.

 

He keeps going, toward daylight and his waiting car, and when he gets behind the wheel, it feels like a different home, like the one he had Before.

 

*****

 

**Report Ten (Unedited)**

**First Charming Expeditionary Force**

**Klamath Falls** **, OR** ****

**17 January 2012**

**Opie Winston, Captain**

 

Fucking crows.  Turns out Klamath Falls is crawling with them.  Literally.  Every tree, every rooftop, phone pole, power line.  Streets are coated in birdshit and the noise is unbelievable.  We saw them a mile out, thought something was burning at first until we realized that smoke doesn’t move like that.  The closer we got, the slower we rolled.  No way in hell we were going through that, not after what happened to Juice.

 

We stopped about a half-mile out for a powwow.  Without the noise of the engines, we could hear them clearly, even from that far away.

 

Chibs spread the map out over the HumVee hood and we considered a way around.  Nothing but dirt roads and blind curves for miles and miles, unless we want to go way out of our way and through Winema National Forest.  No one liked that idea.

 

Decided to chance the backroads on the outskirts of the Falls, hope for the best in terms of road condition.  Already, even on 97, we’ve had to stop three times—twice to clear wreckage, once to haul a billboard out of the way.

 

We figured the vehicles could handle a little off-roading, assuming there was any road to work with. 

 

Even so, moving away from a main road, from wide asphalt and long views, made us all nervous. 

 

Turns out we were right to be nervous.

 

Reno up top is first to see them, bangs on the roof, tells us to halt.  When I looked out the window of the gunboat in the direction he shouted, I could see them too.

  
Fucking crows.

 

Out here, maybe fifteen miles northwest of the city limits, they weren’t as dense, but they were still concentrated enough to be dangerous.

 

And it’s like they’re fucking psychic.  The minute we all laid eyes on them, they sort of wheeled around in unison and came straight at us.

 

“Inside!” I called to Reno, who was trying to get the fifty loose from its mounts.  “Leave it!”  He threw himself into the HumVee and slammed the roof trap shut just as the first birds hit us.

 

I heard Chibs shouting on the walkie and then Juice saying something about rolling up the windows.

 

I couldn’t tell if Grace had gotten back inside the second gunboat and sure as hell couldn’t see it bringing up the rear.  Had to hope those guys were okay.

 

When they hit us, it was like the sky was falling.  First it got dark and then there were just these flashes of black and blue, sky through the wings, and then red as they did the kamikaze thing, throwing themselves against the windshield.  It sounded like gunfire every time they struck, and the Escalade shuddered and rocked.

  
I was glad for the bulletproof glass.

 

Over the walkie, I heard Juice screaming, “Go!  Go!  We can’t stay here.”

 

My hand was on the call button to tell him to calm the fuck down when the first crack appeared in our windshield.

 

Fucking crows.

 

I put the truck in gear and started to roll forward, but I was blind—couldn’t see a fucking thing.  Still, we couldn’t stay here.  If the windshield in a military transport wasn’t holding up, there was no way the Escalades were going to make it out in one piece.

 

Rolling blind through a storm of wings, shit, and blood—I can’t really describe it.  Don’t want to, either, and if you need that level of detail, you can fucking ask someone else.

 

We got through eventually.  Took us forty-five minutes and a lot of swerving.  I was driving by feel most of the time, trying to sense when the tires went off the edge of the road.  Jasper kept on the talkie, asking the other trucks how it was going, and a steady patter of “Car 2 okay” and “Tanker good” helped a little.

 

Eventually, we either drove out of their territory or they got tired of divebombing us and we were clear.

 

I pulled over and got out but left the engine running.  I wanted to assess the damage but I also didn’t want to get caught out if it was some trick of the fucking birds.

  
It looked like we’d done five miles on the Highway to Hell in Iraq.  Shit and blood and black feathers covered every inch of glass.  Up on the tanker, Sack was trying to clear the windshield with a long-handled squeegee, but all it was doing was smearing the crap around.

  
And it stank.  Stank like we’d been sewer-diving.  Stank like death, like right after The End when that crater was reeking up the whole town.

 

It was Tammy Rae, up on the roof of her HumVee trying to clear the fifty of muck, who said, “Hey, look.”

 

We couldn’t see from the ground what she was seeing, but then she said, “Lake.  Maybe a half-click?  There’s an access road. Might be clear.”

 

That was enough for me.  Ten minutes later we were pulled off in a picnic area near a big blue lake hauling buckets of water up from the shore in a chain.

 

Took us two hours to clear the worst of the shit from our windows and to assess the damage.

 

The window on my gunboat would hold, as would the other gunboat’s and two of the Escalades.  One of them, though, was more cracks than glass, and the tanker’s windshield was compromised on the passenger side, though the driver’s side might be alright for awhile.

 

The Escalade couldn’t be driven very far that way, so Juice and Sack took out the busted windshield and left it there. 

 

The tanker windshield was a bigger problem, but there was nothing we could do about it then, so we finished cleaning up, ate a quick supper on our feet, and headed out, hoping to get to Three Rivers by nightfall.

 

Per our orders, we weren’t supposed to travel after dark unless it was an emergency, but since we had two compromised vehicles—one with no windshield at all—we had no choice.

 

Got to Three Rivers an hour after sundown and without any further problems.

 

Henry says they’ve probably got some glass for us.  Sack and Juice will take care of it in the morning.

 

So much for the first 460 miles.

 

*****

 

 _Distance is relative.  The farther you are away from a person, the closer you can feel.  You can be exiled in your own bedroom, too, the person beside you as distant as a stranger sleeping halfway across the world._ (Letters 23:5-7)

 

When Jax pulls in the driveway that evening, it’s to a familiar sight:  Sam staring under the hood of the ’88, Dean beside him, one greasy hand pointing something out.

 

Sometimes it gets him right in the gut, how much he loves what he has, how much he stands to lose.  He tries not to think that way, but given what they’ve already been through, it’s not unrealistic to expect the worst.  So when he sees the man he loves and this kid who’s grown to be such a big part of their lives, Jax has to take a deep breath and try to steady his heart.

 

Dean turns away before Jax can dismount, heads into the garage to adjust something on the hoist, which Jax can see has been set up to one side thanks to clip-lights and a big klieg on a stand, all running off of the solar batteries Joe and Jerry Erstline provide.  They’ve got a field out past Veteran’s Park where they build and maintain the panels.

 

As he approaches the garage, Sam says without looking up, “You screwed up.”

 

Jax knows it.  Has known it all day.  It had distracted him from his business with Grady, his conference with Hale about the investigation into Brenda’s attack, his discussion with Tara about the possible leak from one of the hospital’s staff.

 

Tara had finally said, “What’d you do this time?”

 

He hadn’t even bothered to ask her how she knew, just explained what had happened.

  
She’d pulled a long face, lips tightening, and had been shaking her head by the end of his story.

 

“You’re a jerk,” she’d said when he’d finally shut up.

  
Jax had nodded.  “Yeah, I am.”

 

“Go home.  Talk to Dean.  Tell him that.”

 

So here he was.

  
“I know,” Jax says now to Sam, who still isn’t looking at him. 

 

“Fix it.”

 

“Yeah,” Jax answers, sounding a little defeated.  He and Dean have never been good at talking.  They can fight and drive, fuck and drink, but they can’t always talk.  Most of the time, Jax tells himself that the things they say with their hands matter more, anyway.

 

This isn’t one of those times, though, and he knows it.

 

“I’m heading out,” Sam calls then, wiping his greasy hands on a rag and getting on his bike.  “Thanks, Dean!” he throws over his shoulder when he’s halfway down the driveway.

 

Kid’s smart enough not to give Dean a chance to protest.

 

“Hey,” Dean offers by way of greeting.  He’s adjusting something on the engine hoist, eyes on his work. 

 

“Can we talk?” 

 

At Jax’s words, Dean looks up, as if startled to actually see him standing there, despite the greeting they’d just exchanged.  Or maybe it’s just Jax’s tone that startles him.  Dean isn’t used to that.

 

“Yeah, sure.  Something wrong?”

 

“Let’s just…go inside.”

 

Dean nods, jaw tightening, and Jax realizes how it must sound to Dean, his refusal to elaborate, his insistence on privacy.

  
“Shit, I suck at this,” he says out loud, following Dean over to the scrub sink, where he has stripped off his grease-stained flannel and tee-shirt so that he can wash up.

 

The mass of scars on Dean’s chest is starting to fade a little with age, the smooth shininess finally growing dull and flesh-colored.  The puckered puncture wound Dean had gotten before he knew Jax, the comma-shaped knife scar, the pitchfork mark—he had earned all of them when his whole life had been given over to hunting evil things.  Evil supernatural things.

 

Jax tells himself to man up and says, “I’m sorry,” putting all the feeling he can into it.

 

Dean turns from the sink, forearms dripping, water snaking its way through the complex topography of his ruined chest, and stops him with a gesture.  “Nothing to be sorry for.  You were just doing your job.”

 

“Bullshit.  I could’ve backed you.”

  
But Dean shakes his head, drying his hands and turning to Jax.  “No.  Blue and Hale are good guys…well, Blue is.  Hale’s a pain in the ass.  But they aren’t exactly open-minded when it comes to the boogedy-boogedy shit.  If you backed me before they had evidence for themselves that this was something more than just a fucked-up human being, they’d think it was because you’re fucking me—.”

 

“We’re married,” Jax points out patiently, though with a hint of anger in his voice.  He doesn’t like it when Dean reduces what they have, even if he is speaking from the perspective of other people.

 

“I know.  I asked you, remember?  Point is, they aren’t going to believe me until they see it for themselves, and you aren’t going to convince them because they think you’re too close to the situation.  I’ve already started digging a little, and I’ll do some more poking around on my own, see if I can figure it out.  You let me do my thing.  Act like you’re humoring me.  Keep clear of blame if the shit hits the fan.  Whatever this thing is—monster or man—it’ll show itself eventually.  If it’s my kind of monster, I’ll kill it.  If it’s theirs, they can handle it their own way, though I’m for putting a bullet in the fucker’s heart.”

 

Jax, despite knowing Dean better than he’s ever known any one, is still surprised by him more often than not.

  
“Maybe you should be King of the World,” he observes wryly, and Dean smiles and shakes his head. 

“No way.  Too much work.  Being married to you, I get all the benefits of the job with none of the risks.”

 

“There’s risk,” Jax observes, voice shifting, eyes gleaming dangerously.

 

Dean steps into Jax’s space, hands loose at his sides, a deceptive stance that suggests surrender.

 

But he’s not giving anything up.

 

When Jax brings his hands up to cup Dean’s face for a gentle kiss, Dean breaks the hold and shoves him back a step.

 

His foot hits the hoist stand, rattling the chains overhead. 

 

He gives Dean a look, assessing, unsure.  They play rough sometimes, sure, but this has a different feel to it, and he can’t quite figure it out.

 

Dean clarifies it for Jax a moment later when he says, “Hands over your head.”

 

Jax’s eyes go wide as he tilts his head back enough to see the engine chains hanging there.

 

Okay, definitely a new game.

 

“Garage door’s wide open,” Jax says, trying to sound casual even as his heart is kicking its way through his ribs. 

 

“Yeah, and the whole world will see us.  So what?”

 

The very thought of it makes Jax’s cock twitch, the idea of people watching them, of people seeing Dean chaining Jax up and making him moan. 

 

Fuck, yeah.

 

“Jesus, you’d let me do it, wouldn’t you?” Dean asks then, coming close to wrap his hands around Jax’s wrists and make him do as he was told.  “You really are a pervert,” he adds, licking his way along the column of Jax’s neck before biting him—hard—on the earlobe.

 

Jax jerks at the sudden piercing pain and then breathes out a low moan as Dean soothes the ache by sucking the lobe into his mouth.

 

“Lucky for you that I have more self-control,” Dean observes as he almost off-handedly binds Jax’s hands up before walking over to the pull-rope for the door, yanking it hard to bring it down.

  
The rattle of the heavy door and the bang as it strikes the ground go through Jax like a hand on his cock and he breathes out a, “Jesus,” shocked at the way being bound and locked in here makes him weak with need.

 

If you’d asked him about being tied up, he’d have told you he isn’t into it.  He’d had his share of capture and torture, of incarceration and confinement, Before.  He had never found it the least bit sexy.

 

Obviously, he’d been doing it wrong.

When Dean stalks back across the stained concrete floor, chin tilted down but eyes looking up at Jax, as if he’s considering what instrument of torture to begin with, Jax actually has to swallow back a sound that he’d never forgive himself for making out loud and that Dean would never let him forget.

 

It’s like Dean hears it anyway—Jax’s need probably shows on his face, given the way his cock is straining against his fly—because Dean smiles, a wicked, predatory look that makes Jax say, “Fuck, Dean.  Would you fucking touch me, already?”

 

Dean’s laugh is lightning down Jax’s spine, and he shifts his weight, feeling the drag of the chains against the skin of his wrists—he’s going to have bruises tomorrow, for sure—as he tries to keep Dean in sight, Dean who’s circling him in a lazy round, hand on the hoist stand and then trailing across Jax’s stretched back to tease at the narrow band of skin exposed by the way his hoodie rides up over his waistband.

 

As he comes around the front, Dean hooks a finger into Jax’s jeans and yanks, pulling Jax off-balance, making him struggle to keep from putting too much weight on his bound wrists.  Even as he’s righting himself, Dean’s other hand is down his pants, wrapping around his cock, grip just this side of painful, and Jax is gasping, conflicting needs driving every thought from his head.

  
He needs to shove himself up into Dean’s hand.  He needs to stay on his feet to keep from hurting himself.

  
He needs to feel every part of his naked body rubbing up against Dean.

 

“Dean,” he chokes out, voice strangled by those needs. 

 

Dean’s only response is to twist his palm viciously around the head of Jax’s cock, sending shocking pain-pleasure through him, electric sparks tingling in his toes, his fingers starting to prickle from loss of circulation.

 

He’s hard as hell, can feel dampness now between Dean’s hand and his cock, when Dean pulls his hand away, Jax swaying, knees loose, fighting to stay upright against the pull of the chains. 

 

That fight gets harder when Dean circles around behind him, reaches around, undoes his fly and starts to tug his pants down around his ankles.

 

“Fuck!” he shouts as the rough denim slides over the sensitive, wet head of his cock.  “Fuck,” he breathes out, almost a whisper, as he feels the heat of Dean against his back, hears the sound of another zipper and the heavy thud of boots—one, two—kicked off. 

 

Straining to hear over his own ratcheted breathing, Jax feels the air displaced as Dean kicks his own jeans away and then senses an emptiness at his back as Dean disappears.

 

Wondering if he’s about to be abandoned here, hard and half-naked, chained up like an offering, Jax swallows and waits, listening to hear any sign of Dean.

 

A metallic noise, tinny and indecipherable, catches his ear, and then Dean’s heat is against his back, and the sense of Dean’s proximity makes his mouth dry, his belly tighten.

 

Breath held with waiting, wound up and wanting, Jax jumps when a slick finger traces the small of his back down the crack of his ass and between his cheeks, pausing to nudge the ring of muscle before driving into it without any other preparation.

 

A sharp scent reaches Jax’s nose, and he laughs in sudden understanding, a laugh that turns to a shout as Dean drives a second finger inside of him and crooks them upward, catching Jax’s sweet spot and robbing him of further breath.

 

“D—dean,” he stutters, trying to spread his feet but unable to, remembering in what little part of his brain is still functioning that he’d hobbled Dean in just this way only the other day. 

 

Payback’s a bitch, but she’s a sweet one, he thinks, just as Dean adds a third finger.

 

The fit is tight, even with the engine oil and all of the practice they get, but Dean is relentless and Jax has to concentrate not to drive himself down onto the fingers.  Already, his wrists are stretched and aching.

 

When Dean’s fingers pull away roughly, Jax gasps—it hurts—and that gasp turns to “Fuck, yeah” when Dean’s other hand wraps around Jax’s middle and cradles his cock.

 

“Fuuuuck,” he gasps again, feeling Dean’s cock snug up between his cheeks.

 

Then Dean is entering him, slow and steady, and Jax is trying not to squirm away from the pressure, caught between wanting it and feeling too exposed, too owned.  Dean’s other hand doesn’t move, just cups Jax’s hardness as Dean pushes himself inside of Jax, and Jax at last settles on trying to get more play for his own shaft to distract himself from the way he’s trapped here, pinned on Dean’s cock, hands over his head, body tight with need, voice caught in his throat as Dean is seated at last.

 

Time and breath suspended, Jax waits again for Dean to move, for him to strip Jax’s cock in a tight grip, for Dean to shift inside of him, striking that spot that sparks him up.

 

Nothing.

  
At last, Jax breaks.  “Dean,” he pleads, “Fuck, man, c’mon.  Please.  Move.  Fuck me.  Anything.”

 

With a low laugh in Jax’s ear, Dean slides himself slowly out of Jax, until Jax can feel the wide head of Dean’s cock stretching him.  “Please,” he says again, syllables broken over his need, and Dean snaps his hips up, thrusting hard enough that Jax is driven to his toes, shouting in shock and sheer, electric pleasure even as the chains bite his wrists and Dean’s hand on his cock tightens and pulls, stripping him of seed, his orgasm profound and blinding as he shudders out a stream of come and tries to spread his legs wider for Dean to split him open.

 

When he comes back to himself, Dean’s arm is strong around his chest, Dean’s chest hot against his back.  Dean is still inside of him, slowly softening, and Jax can feel the squelching slide as Dean slips free.

  
It wrings a moan from him, and he rests his head back against Dean’s shoulder.

 

“Okay?” Dean asks, free hand stroking low across Jax’s still-shaking belly.

 

“Yeah,” Jax says, but he’s barely audible, his throat raw from shouting.

 

Dean’s chuckle is loud in Jax’s ear and vibrates through him as Dean lifts up on Jax’s torso, putting some slack in the chains so he can release the other man.

 

Jax tells himself it’s only because he’s been trapped in such an odd posture for so long that he can’t stand up without Dean’s help once he’s free, but he knows—and he knows Dean knows—that that’s not the case at all.

 

At last, though, he works up the energy to turn in Dean’s arms and lay a wide, open-mouthed, sloppy kiss on Dean, who returns it like he’s waiting for a stay of execution and Jax is his last meal.

 

Jax is breathing hard and half-interested again, despite the annihilation of that orgasm, when Dean pulls away from him and slowly lets him go, keeping his hands in the air around Jax’s waist in case the biker can’t yet stand on his own.

 

It’s when Dean steps back with a low whistle that Jax follows his husband’s eyes to his wrists and sees there the angry red abrasions where the chains had bitten into him.  Where the bones of his wrists rise from the skin, there’s blood, and Dean makes a sound and reaches out a finger to trace the wounds.

  
“Don’t,” Jax says gently, pulling his hands back.  “It’s okay.  Fuck, Dean, it’s more than okay.”

 

Dean’s eyes find Jax’s, a question in them, one they’ll never put to words.  Jax nods, licks his dry lips and wishes he had something to say that would mean what he’s feeling.

 

Instead, he lets his eyes and a careful finger trace the outline of the place over Dean’s heart where he used to wear a pendant that meant love and home and together and forever.

 

“It’s the same,” he says, low but clear, hoping Dean will get it.

 

By the way Dean swallows, jerks his head, turns away before Jax can see the glitter of unshed tears, Jax knows his husband understands.  Knows they’re good.

 

Later, over leftover stew (Jax) and chili (Dean), Dean fills him in on what he’s learned so far, which can be summed up in a single word:  Bupkis. 

 

“The scene was crawling with cops.  Whatever evidence they’ve found is probably under lock and key already.  I can scan it for EMF, but I have to wait until the house is clear.  Even then…”

  
He pauses, as though reluctant to say any more.

  
“What?” Jax pushes.

 

Dean shakes his head.  “Sometimes, it takes another attack before we get enough information.”

 

Jax notices the collective pronoun and says nothing, but he feels a girly part of him stutter and then sing at being included.

 

“Sucks, but it’s true.”

 

“So what next, then?”

 

Dean shrugs.  “If the EMF turns up nothing, I’ll try checking out the local lore, see if there’s some legend that might account for a snow monster.  Doesn’t seem likely, but it’s good to eliminate the possibility.”

 

“You might talk to Biddy,” Jax suggests.  “She’s our oldest resident and has been here her whole life.”

 

Dean nods, face lighting up.  “Maybe she’ll have pie.”

 

Jax laughs.  “You give her some notice, I’ll bet she will.  She likes you.”

 

Dean smirks.  “All old ladies like me.  I’m delicious.”

 

Jax makes a show of licking his lips, says, “Yes, you are,” and lets his eyes fill with questionable intentions.

 

By the time they get around to doing the dishes, the remnants are hardened to glue on the bottom of the bowls, but neither of them minds even a little.

 

*****

 

 _All I know for sure is that for as big as this country is, as much of it as we’ve seen, it’s still too small sometimes for the kind of people you find in it._ (Letters 24:4)

 

Dean borrows a nondescript Acura from the Yard, where Sack and Chibs keep a few fuel-efficient cars for errands that require something bigger than a bike but smaller than an SUV.  It’s one of Jax’s many initiatives, in this case about keeping people happy.  Since the general populace has fuel rations, it wouldn’t do to flaunt their own surplus of gas.

 

The Acura is a hell of a lot less obvious than the Impala, which everyone in Charming knows belongs to Dean. 

 

He cruises Brenda’s block first, slowing just a touch in front of her modest little two-bedroom ranch.  The woman is still in the hospital, of course—Tara had told Jax she’d be in for at least a couple more days—and it looks like there’s no one actually at the house.

  
But a half-block down in the other direction, Dean passes a brown pick-up.  Even a casual observer—and Dean isn’t one—would probably notice the way the interior of the driver’s side window is fogged up.  Clearly, someone’s inside, ducking down to avoid being seen.

  
Dean indulges in a disrespectful sound and then goes around the block, parks there, skirts through the side yard of an empty Dutch Colonial, hops the chainlink into Brenda’s backyard, and picks the back door lock with a bent paper clip in about twenty seconds.

  
“I’ve still got it,” he murmurs to himself, already sweeping the kitchen with the EMF.  Not so much as a blip.

 

It’s clear that the cops didn’t do anything in the kitchen except collect evidence.  There’s a film of black fingerprint powder on every once-shining surface.  An overturned fruit bowl scatters bruised oranges across the white tile floor.

 

Both stools at the breakfast bar are on the floor, the second missing two legs, broken off at jagged angles.

 

The phone has been ripped from the wall and there’s a score-mark beside it in the shape of a clawed hand.

 

Dean counts the furrows—four—and measures the span, figuring whatever made it had to have fingers at least nine or ten inches long.

 

“Not a person,” he says to himself.  “Not even in a costume.”  No way fake nails could have made such deep gouges in the drywall.

 

He examines the windowsills and thresholds closely for sulfur, finds nothing, and then does an EMF sweep and window-and-door check throughout the rest of the house, too, just to be thorough.  Nothing else in the house seems to be disturbed.

 

The basement turns up one other interesting detail—a shattered window through which the mystery monster must have come.  Nothing on the window, no blood or hair, but since the sill here is dusted, too, Dean figures the cops would have collected whatever evidence there might have been.

 

“Damn,” he breathes, letting himself out and locking up behind him, retracing his steps to the car.  He hadn’t really expected to find anything after the cops had been there, but it would’ve been nice.

His next step is a lot more complicated, and if he gets caught, there’ll be trouble for Jax.

 

Still, he doesn’t know what else to do—he has to see what evidence the cops have gathered.

 

Of course, halfway through the day shift is not the time to infiltrate the Sheriff’s Office.  Dean knows from patrolling with Blue that the fewest deputies are on duty in the dark hours from midnight to six a.m., Hale relying on the nightly patrols and a couple of office volunteers to pick up any enforcement slack. 

  
Charming’s pretty quiet at all hours, but it’s especially dead at night, when things are dark.  The curfew for electric power is nine p.m. during the week, eleven p.m. Friday and Saturday.  Most people sleep based on that schedule since there’s not much to do in the dark.

 

Late-night prowling seems in order in that case, and Dean is surprised to catch himself feeling relieved.  He’s not looking forward to putting one over on Charming’s police force.  Time was, he wouldn’t have hesitated on such a lark; hell, he’d relished making bumpkin brown hats look like idiots.  But he knows most of these people by name, sees them around town.  He may not be comfortable with the law in general, but most of the men and women who volunteer as deputies are decent and hard-working.

  
They don’t deserve to be made fools of. 

 

If there were another way, Dean would find it, but unhappily, there isn’t, not unless Hale has had a sudden change of heart about involving Dean in the investigation.  Since Dean calculates those odds as being even with the likelihood of Charming winning the Super Bowl next Saturday, he guesses he’s going to have to prowl the cop shop.

  
Meanwhile, he’s got several hours to kill, and since he’d called Biddy St. Joan that morning, he knows exactly where he can kill time—and pie.

 

Biddy’s house looks like something out of a magazine.  A wide, well-groomed green lawn leads up to native shrubs, trimmed into pleasing shapes that compliment the porch’s white railings and striped posts and give a pleasing symmetry to the windows and wide oak door.  The house itself, a dormered two-storey, is painted complementary shades of green and peach, with eggplant highlights on the gingerbread and copping.

 

And Jesus, Dean’s really got to stop spending so much time hanging out in the hospital waiting room with six-year-old Martha Stewart magazines.  Next thing, he’ll be coordinating their bath towels and suggesting color schemes for the living room.

 

The interior is as immaculate as the exterior, and the whole house is redolent with freshly baked cherry pie, which Biddy wastes no time slicing and setting in front of Dean, along with her “world famous” coffee.

 

At the first bite, Dean thinks he might have to excuse himself to get some privacy.  On the second bite, he’s sure he’s going to make embarrassing noises.  When he tries the coffee, he gets a sudden pang of guilt, realizing this is as close as he’s going to come to cheating on anyone—in this case, Miriam, who heretofore had Dean’s vote for “best coffee in the world.”

 

When the world’s been reduced to a handful of outposts scattered across the breadth of the country, the competition isn’t quite as stiff, true.  But Miriam might find it upsetting to discover she’s got a challenger right in her own backyard.

Dean gets over his momentary qualms, though, and finishes his first piece and cup in record time.  Biddy refills both cup and plate and slips into the chair across the table from him, leaning forward on her hand and saying, “So, what can I help you with, Dean?  Man troubles?”

 

It’s a credit to the many blowjobs he’s given Jax that his gag reflex is so well-controlled.  Otherwise, he might’ve spewed hot coffee and half-digested pie all over the old matron.

 

As it is, he chokes, hacks his way to a clear throat, and wipes tears from the corners of his eyes before wheezing, “No.  No.  Just wondering what you could tell me about any strange goings-on here in Charming back in the day.  Before.”

 

“You mean like Mr. Werner, who turned out to have a secret shrine to Adolf Hitler in his basement?”

 

Interesting as that is, that’s not actually what Dean means.

  
“No, like ghosts stories.  Or weird sightings.  Anything like that.”

 

“Oooooh.  You’re wondering about snow monsters.”

 

Dean sighs internally and turns the corners of his mouth up in a totally insincere smile.  “I don’t suppose you’ve actually heard of anything like that before.”

 

“Big Foot?” she asks.  Technically, Big Foot is North American and the Yeti hails from the Himalayas, but who’s quibbling?

 

“Yeah, like that.”

 

“No,” she says after a minute.  “I don’t think…  Wait!  Wait, I think there was something.  Now just let me see…”

 

She rises with a spryness all out of synch with her age, and Dean is still contemplating the possibility that she herself is some sort of supernatural creature when she returns with a leather-bound scrapbook twice as long as her forearm and dusty with disuse.

 

She blows dust from the cover and opens it, spilling the scent of old paper and pressed flowers into the air.

 

Biddy lingers over a few pages, murmuring to herself about balls and boys and a world long gone before the actual world had itself ended.

 

At last she says, “There!” and points a gnarled, manicured finger at a yellowing newspaper article, edges curled inward where the glue has started to fail.  She turns the book so that he can see it.

 

“I kept this because the young man mentioned in the article, the witness, Bertie Sommers, was my younger brother’s best friend.  Bertie was never quite the same after that, either.  Enlisted in the Army and was killed in Korea.”

  
Eyes wistful and sad, Biddy falls silent and lets Dean read.

 

When he’s finished, Dean leans back in his chair and says, “Huh.”

“You think it might be the same thing that attacked Brenda?” Biddy asks.

 

Dean shakes himself out of his thoughts to give the sharp old lady a considering look.  “I think it’s probably best I don’t speculate until I have more information.”

 

“But there are similarities,” Biddy insists.  Dean can’t help but nod.  “Yeah, there are.”

 

What the article lacked in specific detail, the writer had made up for in colorful innuendo. 

 

In 1951, eighteen year old Bertie Sommers had come home one January afternoon to find his mother unconscious and bleeding on their kitchen floor.  He’d called an ambulance before checking the house to make sure her attacker wasn’t lurking in a closet, and what he’d seen—or thought he’d seen—going out a cellar window had made him sound like a crazy person ever thereafter, at least until his unfortunate end on Heartbreak Ridge.

 

“It wasn’t a man,” he was quoted as saying.  “It was a monster.  It had fur all over its body and long arms, like a gorilla.  Its face was terrible.”

 

Biddy continues the story not found in any newspaper.

 

“Of course, people said it might have been Bertie himself who’d beaten up his mother.  They’d never gotten along.  Bertie was too strong-willed, and she was always sipping the cooking sherry, if you know what I mean.  But I never believed it.  I’d watched that boy grow up.  He was practically part of our family.  My mother always took in strays, children who weren’t treated right at home.  Anyway, he hadn’t the temperament to hurt her like that.  He might’ve stolen money from her pocketbook or borrowed the car without asking, but he wasn’t the kind of boy who’d resort to violence.”

 

“Thanks, Ms. Saint-Joan.  You’ve been a big help,” Dean says, rising.

 

She offers her hand, and he shakes it, only to be pulled by a surprisingly strong arm into an astonishingly thorough hug.  

 

“It’s Biddy,” she insists, releasing him at last.  “Remember that.  And you’re always welcome.  You know you don’t need an excuse to come for pie and coffee, don’t you?  I miss having handsome young men around the place.  I had a decorator, gay as the day is long, and he would sing as he tried out fabric swatches against the wallpaper.  Oh, my, but he had a beautiful ass.  Like yours,” she adds, following him down the hallway toward her front door.

  
Dean half expects a goosing, but he escapes with his honor intact, and once safely out of her reach on the front porch, he says, “Thanks,” again and promises to bring Jax by sometime, too.

 

“I have some things I want to discuss with him,” she says confidentially, pitching her voice low, as if the neighbors might be listening.

 

“I’ll let him know.” 

 

Biddy throws Dean a wicked wink and then closes the door, only to reappear at the front window to wave him off down the driveway.

 

He decides to head home, see if Sam needs some help on the ’88.  It’s too late for the hospital—Whit’s usually catching up on lost sleep come midafternoon—and he can’t hit the Sheriff’s Office until midnight or later.

 

Sam isn’t there, but Jax is, sitting on the couch with a half-drunk beer, staring at the blank television screen.

 

“You okay?” Dean asks as he comes in, and Jax looks up as though surprised to see Dean in their living room. 

 

He shakes it off with an effort, says, “Yeah,” on a tired out-breath, and stands up to pull Dean into a hug, which he abandons with haste and a disgusted face.

  
“You smell like you got rolled by a grandma,” Jax says, pushing Dean back.  “You catting around on me?”

 

“Yeah, I’m seeing someone else.  She’s got a lot of miles and some good stories, but I really only love her for her pie.”

 

“Shut up,” Jax intones then, shoving Dean with a lazy hand until Dean sits down on the couch.  Jax joins him. 

 

“Anything?”

 

“Maybe,” Dean answers, spending a few minutes to fill Jax in.

 

“What’s next?”  Jax asks, hand unconsciously rubbing Dean’s “bad” knee, which is mostly okay since the surgery fixed him up like near-new.

 

Dean hesitates, torn between wanting to be honest with Jax and wanting to give him plausible deniability.  If he doesn’t tell Jax what he’s planning, Jax can be surprised if something goes wrong and Dean gets caught.

 

“Never mind,” Jax says after a minute, voice wry with recognition of Dean’s reason for the silence.  “Tell me in the morning.”

 

“I might be…late…tonight,” Dean does tell him, figuring Jax might worry otherwise.  “Patrol,” he bluffs, but it’s clear from his tone that he’s lying and he knows Jax knows it.  One thing he can say about being the King of the World’s right (and left) hand man—he’s learned a lot about saying things without saying much at all.  Comes in handy.

 

“In that case, maybe I should assert my husbandly rights right now,” Jax suggests, hand tightening on Dean’s knee and then sliding up his thigh.

  
Much as Dean would like to spread his legs and let Jax have his way with him, he’s got something to do before his B&E gig at the cop shop.

 

He groans and shakes his head.  “I’d like to.  Believe me,” he adds breathily as Jax’s hand brushes over Dean’s half-hard cock.  “But I can’t.  I have to—.”

 

Jax distracts him by popping the button on his fly and slowly sliding down the zipper, but he catches Jax’s hand before it can wander on to the point of no return.

 

“I can’t,” he repeats.  It’d sound more convincing if his voice weren’t so breathy.  He clears his throat and tries again.  “I have to see Chuck.”

 

“What for?”

 

“I don’t want to leave him hanging where we did last week.  He deserves a little better than to be treated like he’s a drunken nutcase.”

 

Jax’s hands are suddenly busy elsewhere, and Dean takes advantage of the pause in the festivities to readjust himself and do up his fly.

 

When he’s decent, he gives Jax a look.  His husband is sitting with his hands loose between his knees, leaning forward and staring hard at a spot between his boots.

 

“You got a problem with Chuck I should know about?” Dean asks then, trying not to feel defensive.  Chuck’s his friend, after all, and the last vestige of his life Before.  He’s sort of protective of the neurotic little loser, even if he gives Chuck his own share of grief.

 

Jax leans back then, head lolling against the couch’s worn headrest.  When he speaks, it’s to the ceiling.  “No.  I just think… .  Well, Chuck doesn’t always do right by your case.  The case of people like you.  I mean, people from Before who—.”

 

“I get it,” Dean says, sparing Jax any more of the painful verbal stumbling.  “People associate Chuck with me, and when he acts batshit, they have to wonder about me, too.”

 

“I know you’re not crazy, Dean.”

  
Dean nods but doesn’t answer.  Most of him believes Jax when he says that.  But a little part of him is always waiting for the other shoe to drop from the sky and crush his life flat.

 

“Dean,” Jax says more softly, putting a hand on his knee once more. 

 

Dean turns to look at Jax and sees in his husband’s eyes a certainty and faith in Dean that Dean doesn’t have in himself.  When Jax looks at him like that, Dean sometimes feels like a stand-in for the hero in a story he didn’t write.  No way he’s earned that look.

 

“I trust you.  Whatever you say, I’ll believe.  I thought we’d figured that out last night.”

 

Desire sparks through him, making him twitch with its electric touch, and Jax smiles, a slow, lazy grin that spreads his lips into an obscene expression.

 

Dean wants to eat it from Jax’s mouth.

  
Instead, he sighs and pushes himself to his feet, looks down long and hard at Jax, and says, “Don’t wait up.”

  
“Yes, dear,” Jax answers as Dean heads for the spare room, where they keep their back-up guns, gun cabinet, and miscellaneous supplies.  In Dean’s case, he’s looking for his lock-picking kit, which he hasn’t had to use in years.  Paper clips usually suffice in Charming, but he expects a bigger challenge from local law enforcement.

 

Despite the hiatus in use, the kit is right where Dean always keeps it, in the beat-up old olive drab duffel he used to take on jobs, in which he’d also keep spare holy water, consecrated oil, iron nails and filings, blessed silver, and other accoutrements of his trade.  His former trade. 

 

Sighing, he tucks the set into his back pocket, checks the gun at his back as a matter of habit, and grabs his leather jacket out of the front hall closet on his way to the door.

  
Jax is still sitting on the couch, though now he’s got the television turned on, _Easy Rider_ on mute in the player. 

 

“You sure you’re okay?”

 

“Just tired,” Jax answers, pausing the DVD and rising, crossing the living room in that deceptively casual stroll that nevertheless eats up the distance between them.

  
Dean has to swallow the kick of his heart at the way Jax is looking at him. 

  
There, in the twilight, framed by the open front door, Jax steps into Dean’s space until Dean yields, back against the doorframe, pinned by Jax’s weight and by the tongue he’s sliding along Dean’s lower lip.

 

Dean opens his mouth, takes in the taste of beer and Jax, wants suddenly to stay and wonders traitorously if that’s Jax’s intention.  Still, even that thought doesn’t distract him from Jax’s hands, which are working their way up under Dean’s layers, stroking the cold metal of his gun, grinding it into the small of Dean’s back.

 

Dean arches away from the sensation only to meet Jax’s hardness, which he can feel through their twin layers of denim.

  
“Jesus,” Dean roughs out at last, pulling away with an effort of main will.  “Your mouth’s a fucking menace.”

 

That mouth smirks at Dean, self-satisfied and swollen. 

 

“Don’t be too late,” Jax leers, stepping back and making a show of adjusting his cock in his jeans.

 

Dean swallows and fumbles for the screen door handle, more falling than stepping out of the house.

 

He tries not to think about how uncomfortably tight his jeans are or how much he wants to go back inside the house and fuck Jax wide open over the arm of the couch while Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson riff about America in the background.

 

It’s not that they don’t have a lot of sex—they do.  And it’s not that Dean isn’t capable of self-control—he is.

 

But something about Jax lately, about the way he looks at Dean, looks into him, like he knows Dean and will always know Dean and Dean can count on that.  It both turns him on like a hand reaching into his secret places and squeezing and terrifies him like that same hand wrapping around his heart and wrenching it free.

 

Jesus, he’s got to stop watching horror movies.

 

Shaking off the bloody images and the vague uneasiness Jax’s behavior leaves him with, Dean climbs into the Impala and heads a few blocks over to Chuck and Wendy’s house.

 

They’ve got an hour before curfew, and there’s a light on in the living room, casting a warm glow onto the bushes and little patch of lawn and concrete stoop.

 

He knocks, hears footsteps approaching, resists reaching for his gun.  Even after all this time, some things are just second nature.

 

Wendy answers, face a mask of conflicted feelings—happiness, worry, a little anger.  Dean gets it.  He’s supposed to be Chuck’s friend, and he didn’t back the guy when Chuck needed him.

 

“Hey, Wendy,” Dean says, and Wendy steps back to let Dean enter.  “Sorry about the other day.”

 

“Not me you should be apologizing to, Dean,” she answers, nodding toward the back of the house.  “He’s been waiting for you to visit for days,” she calls after him.  He waves his acknowledgement of her words, which sound not angry but resigned. 

  
He knows what he’ll find when he goes out the back door.

 

Chuck is sitting under the one tree in their tiny backyard, staring up through its branches at whatever sliver of stars is visible tonight.

 

He knows there’ll be a bottle at Chuck’s feet and an empty chair beside him.

 

He and Chuck have spent more than one evening passing the bottle and talking about nothing or everything, Before and after.

 

“I’m sorry, man,” he says, settling into his accustomed seat and snagging the bottle, careful to take only two careful swallows, wanting to be clear-headed for the larceny he’s planning for later.

 

“’s okay,” Chuck slurs.  He’s got his head resting against the chair-back, but he rolls it toward Dean.  In the scant light coming from the kitchen window, Chuck’s eyes look wet.

 

“No, it’s not.  I’m your friend. I should’ve backed you.”

 

“No,” Chuck answers, waggling his head without raising it from the chair.  “No, no, no no... .  Then people would’ve thought you were crazy like me, and you ‘n’ Jax can’t afford that.”

 

It’s so close to what Dean had said to Jax only a few minutes ago that he feels his expression shift to suspicion and narrows his eyes, examining the ex-prophet’s pale face where it floats in the vague light.

 

“You reading me?” he asks, voice a little harder than he’d meant it to be.  He really hates that psychic shit.

 

“Nah,” Chuck giggles, head swiveling back to take in the stars overhead.  “I just know what’s what,‘s all.  Plus, Wendy said something about it.  She’s really political,” he adds, and it takes Dean a minute to see how the last statement is related to all the others.

 

“Still…it has to suck to see things and have no one believe you.  It’s not like I can’t relate.”

 

Chuck nods, eyes still on the stars.  “Yeah, you and Sam sure had that market cornered.  Anyway, it’s not a big thing, except that I keep having the same vision, and I don’t know what it means.”

 

“You try telling Wendy about it?”

 

“Can’t.  Words just won’t come.  It’s like…”  Chuck flails with one hand, reaches for the bottle with the other, sloshes some amber liquid onto his tee-shirt as he brings the bottle to his mouth.  “It sucks,” he finishes solemnly a few moments later.

 

“Well,” Dean says, slapping Chuck’s shoulder as he stands back up—no sense trying to talk to the ex-prophet when he’s this tanked.  “You take it easy, Chuck, you hear me?  Maybe ease off the sauce a little, for Wendy’s sake, huh?”

 

Chuck nods, an uncoordinated bobbing of his chin, and as Dean’s walking toward the back door, the little man breaks into a warbled version of “Bridge over Troubled Water.”

 

Wendy steps into the hall from the kitchen as Dean approaches the doorway.

 

“He’s been drinking like that since the victory party.  I don’t know what to do, Dean.  I think he’s…losing his mind?”  She shakes her head, wringing a damp dishtowel convulsively in her hands.

 

“Hey,” Dean says, wrapping one hand around her near shoulder and squeezing.  “It’s gonna be okay.  He’ll snap out of it.  You know how he gets.  Once the visions stop—.”

 

But she’s already shaking her head vigorously, and he’s not surprised that she interrupts him.  “No, Dean, this is different.  He’s…they’re killing him, I think.”  Her voice breaks on voicing her fear, and Dean takes her into his arms for a quick hug.

 

“It’ll all work out, Wendy, you’ll see.  He’s been through worse than this before and he survived, remember?  I was there.  I know.”

 

She nods against his chest and steps back, his hands falling from her shoulders.

 

“Call me if he doesn’t get any better in the next couple of days, okay?  I’ll come over and see if I can’t slap some sense into him.”  He tries to keep his voice light, and by the grateful look in Wendy’s reddened eyes, he must succeed.

 

Still, he can’t seem to escape a low-level dread dogging him all the way to the car, down the block, through Charming, and out to the Gate, where he’d promised to meet Hale for an update on his part of the McClellan case.  Hale had put him and the boys on night watch of Brenda’s place.

 

“Nothing much going on at the house,” Blue reports, tapping a finger against his walkie.  “All’s been quiet.”

 

Dean nods.  “She’s still in the hospital, though.  Maybe what—whoever did it is lying low, waiting for her to come home.”

 

“Possible.  We’ve got a guy at the hospital, too, relieving Hale’s day shift.  Nothing’s going to get to her there.”

 

“Hale say anything more about who he thinks attacked her?”

 

“Nope.  He’s keeping it close, even to me.  I think he’s a little unsettled that this happened right in Charming.  He’s used to the shit coming in from outside.”

 

“Yeah, well,” Dean starts, by his tone indicating what he thinks of Hale’s provincial perspective.  Blue makes a derisive sound of agreement.

 

“Jax should be careful, though, not to step on Hale’s toes.  The guy’s wound tight on this one, plus some people are still talking about electing a new leader of Charming instead of assuming that Jax has the authority.”

 

“Whatever.” Dean’s tone is tired and dismissive, but he knows that Blue has a point.  “We’ll be careful.”

 

“You do that,” Blue answers, emphasizing the first word.  When Dean shoots him a sharp look, Blue winks.

 

Does everybody seem to know that Dean’s going to break into the Sheriff’s Office tonight?

 

They exchange the usual parting, and Dean sketches a wave at the guys on the gun-towers before climbing back into the Impala for the short drive into the town proper.  He intends to park her in front of the only after-hours gathering place, a pool hall-cum-tavern called “Merle’s,” recently opened by the town’s one and only barber, who’d said they needed someplace other than his chair to hang out and shoot the shit.

 

They don’t always have liquor or beer to serve, but there’s usually someone there hustling a game of pool or playing a hand of five card stud, and no one would be surprised to see the Impala out front.  Dean spends a night or two a month entertaining the locals and teaching the younger generation bank shots on Merle’s felt-topped table.

 

The Sheriff’s Department is housed on the ground floor of the Town Hall, with a separate entrance and parking lot around the back of the stately tan brick building.  Dean strolls toward the door, investing every step with a casual easiness that he doesn’t feel.

 

Inside, the desk clerk, a pretty girl of about twenty, smiles and says, “Evening, Mr. Winchester.  You here to see Sheriff Hale?  He’s not on duty right now.”

 

“No, Cheryl,” he says, taking in the blue name tag perched pertly over her left breast.  “I’m actually wondering if I could pick up the envelope Sheriff Hale left for me here at the desk.”

 

He lets it hang there while he watches her eyes track with increasing desperation over the empty surface of the reception and dispatch desk.

 

“I—.  Are you sure he meant to leave it with me?  There’s nothing here.”

 

“Oh, well, maybe he just forgot to give it to you.  Do you think you could maybe check his desk for me?  Maybe he left it there.  My name should be on it.”

 

“No, sir.  I mean, I—I’d like to, but I’m not supposed to leave the desk,” which Dean well knew when he asked her.

 

“Oh.  That’s too bad.  Is anyone else here?  Maybe a deputy could take a peek for me, get the envelope.  I wouldn’t keep insisting, but it’s…delicate…information.  Very hush-hush.”  He says this last like he’s trusting her with a state secret, and she strains forward a little in her chair to whisper, “Is it about the Confederacy?”

 

“How did you know?” Dean asks, feigning total astonishment at her amazing psychic gifts.

 

She simpers, goddamn simpers, and he feels like a total heel.  Then she sobers, realizing, “There’s no one else here, Mr. Winchester.”

 

“Call me Dean,” he says then, realizing he’s slipping or he’d have made that offer the first time she’d called him by his father’s name.

 

“Dean, I guess I could…” She hesitates, and he waits:  To nudge or not to nudge, that is the $64,000 question.

 

At last she finishes, “I could let you go back there.  If you promise just to go straight to his desk, pick up the envelope, and come right back here.”

 

“Promise,” he says, smiling his most charming smile, the one that used to get him phone numbers from Maine to Oregon.

 

As soon as he’s out of her sight into the squad room, he makes a beeline for the temporary evidence lock-up, a freestanding chain-link cage tucked into a corner between the interrogation room and the vending machines.  The more permanent evidence room is in the basement with the jail cells, but Dean’s pretty sure Hale would keep such recently gathered evidence—and evidence on an active case—in the temporary lock-up.

 

His lock-picks make quick work of the lock, and he’s careful to slip it from its bolt-ring without making a sound.  Likewise, he eases the cage door open carefully, afraid of squeals.  But Hale runs a tight ship, as Dean had expected—in fact, counted on—and there’s no sound at all as he steps into the lock-up and rifles through three clear plastic boxes, in each of which are red-trimmed evidence baggies, all neatly labeled.

  
It takes him a half-minute to examine the “evidence” from the McClellan scene.  As expected:  Nothing.

 

The evidence log, written neatly on a clipboard attached to the interior of the cage door, shows that a hank of hair collected from the basement window was sent to St. Thomas for analysis.

  
Shit. 

 

Closing the gate and locking it soundlessly, Dean pulls an envelope from his inner jacket pocket and smoothes it out.  In it are folded newspapers from 2009.  On the front, in neat, block print, is his name.

 

He waves this “important document” at Cheryl and thanks her for doing her part for Charming.  She giggles again, flashing attractive dimples and presenting twin, grade-A assets before he makes good his escape.

 

It was so easy inside that he half expects to run into Hale himself in the parking lot, but there, too, he can make a clean getaway.

 

Too easy, he thinks, until he remembers that he has to examine the hair, which is in a lab at St. Thomas.

  
In Tara’s lab, to be exact.

 

 _Shit_.

 

So, does he sneak around behind Jax’s back and hope he doesn’t get caught?  Or does he ask Jax to intercede on his behalf with Tara, see if she’ll give him the information he wants?

 

These aren’t the kind of moral dilemmas he’d dealt with back in the days when it was just the family business.  He’s got a different kind of family now, and it brings with it challenges he’s not quite used to.

 

Finally deciding that asking forgiveness is easier than seeking permission, particularly if the latter keeps Jax clear of any suspicion of interfering with Hale’s investigation, Dean drops in for a beer at Merle’s.  He listens for awhile to Lionel Whitting bitch about his neighbor, who apparently keeps the hedges too high for Lionel’s tastes, and when he thinks he’s left an impression on people, he leaves, slapping a gas chit on the counter for Merle’s troubles.

 

Merle tips an invisible hat at Dean and says, “Thanks, Dean.”

 

He picks up the Impala, drives her to within a couple of blocks of the hospital, and pulls her in behind the double garage of an empty duplex. 

 

Keeping to the shadows, he makes quick work of the distance to the hospital, cutting cross-lots where he can, avoiding the streets.

 

There’s a side entrance that isn’t typically lighted or guarded; earlier in the day, he’d slapped some duct tape over the door catch. Thankfully, no one had noticed, and he slips silently into the unused wing of the hospital, turning on a narrow penlight to guide him toward the lab, which is on the far end of the main hallway, closer to the inhabited parts of the hospital than Dean would like, but that can’t be helped.

 

He knows Tara’s lab because he’s visited here there once or twice in the bad old days when she had been desperately trying to find a cure for the sick kids who’d been infected with something they still haven’t identified.  She’s not an epidemiologist or, in fact, any other kind of research doctor, but since they couldn’t exactly do a national search for one, she was the best the hospital had.

 

Or rather, all four doctors were. 

 

They had a couple of trained lab techs, good people who had biology degrees though no practical knowledge but who’d been happy to contribute something to the cause of continued health in Charming.

 

The more complicated stuff—investigative work or medical examinations of the dead—the doctors divided amongst themselves.

 

This time of night, he doesn’t expect much of a crowd in this hallway. 

 

It’s dark in the corridor leading to Tara’s lab, the only light what’s washed in from the far end where the nurse’s station sports an emergency fixture on low solar power.  Still, he finds his way with relative ease, pleased that he hasn’t lost his touch for creeping dark buildings.  The laboratory lock takes a minute thirty to pick, but Dean lets himself off light since he hasn’t had much call for lockpicking lately, and this one is considerably more complicated than the padlock on the evidence locker at the Sheriff’s Office.

  
Still, he should probably practice more often.

 

He has a moment of stillness as the lock clicks open when he swears he hears his brother teasing him for taking so long, and then it’s gone on a breath of cool, faintly chemical-laced air.

 

The evidence is in a locked drawer in the lab table, and Dean resists the urge to crow a little to his long-dead brother when he gets this one open in six seconds flat. 

 

A quick scan with the EMF meter turns up zilch, and he hesitates a moment, staring at the evidence seal, thinking about how he wouldn’t have thought twice about breaking it back in the old days, Before.

 

Now, though…

 

Sighing, he slips into a pair of gloves snagged from a box on a nearby countertop, slides the blade of his penknife behind the seal, breaks it, and flips open the flap.

 

From what he can tell through the gloves, the hair is white, coarse, and thick, and in the narrow beam of his penlight, it seems almost pearlescent, glowing when he turns it just so.  He’s moving with it toward a microscope on the counter to his right when the door bangs open and he hears, “Freeze!” at almost the same moment he hears the sickening rush of dog’s nails on the floor.

 

Head full of the sound of the beast’s breathing, amplified by the sudden pounding of his blood in his ears, Dean drops the hair and penlight and reaches for his gun.

  
“I said FREEZE!”

 

Blinking against the burst of light as someone turns on the overheads, Dean is caught with one hand halfway to his gun and the other held out desperately to still the rush of a German Shepherd that is sitting three feet away, eyes avid for the tiniest move on Dean’s part.

 

“Dean?”

 

Tara.  _Shit_.

 

She’s peeking around one of Blue’s guys, who’s standing there with a gun in one hand, aim steady despite the blood dripping down his other hand, making a steady mess on the white lab floor.

 

“What the hell are you—?” She starts, but she must catch sight of the open evidence bag and then the hank of white hair on the floor at his feet.  “Seriously?”  She doesn’t exactly raise her voice, but it’s nevertheless evident that she’s pissed.

 

Really, really pissed.

 

 _Fuck_.

 

“It’s okay, Nestor.  Give me a minute, will you?”

 

“You sure, Doctor Knowles?”

 

“I’m sure.  It’s fine.  I’ll take it from here.  You shouldn’t be straining yourself, anyway.  I’ll be right there and we’ll get you taken care of.”

 

“Yes, ma’am,” Nestor says.  “I can leave Brute with you, if you want.”

 

“No, that’s fine.  Just go on down to the ER and have Janie get you settled in.”

 

“Yes, ma’am,” he says again, stowing his hand cannon and whistling for the dog, who only reluctantly turns from making a meal of Dean with his eyes.

 

“You want to tell me what the fuck you think you’re doing tampering with evidence in my lab?”

 

“You don’t beat around the bush, do you?” Dean stalls, smiling wanly at her.

  
“Save the charm for Jax.  I’m not interested.  Just tell me what you’re doing in here.  And step away from the evidence.  You’re contaminating it.”

 

She doesn’t buy his first two explanations.

 

Apparently “wild dog” and “mutant hog” aren’t all that credible.

 

At last, he settles on the truth, or at least as much of the truth as he’s managed to piece together.

  
“I think whatever attacked Brenda is a monster of some kind.  Something evil.  I’m trying to track it, but Hale’s not letting me anywhere near the evidence.”

 

“So you thought breaking into my lab in the middle of the night was the right way to go about getting what you wanted?  Does Jax know?”

 

“No,” Dean answers.

 

Tara snorts.  “Right.  Ask a stupid question…” 

 

Dean shifts awkwardly in place, wondering how to fix this, wondering if she’ll keep it to herself.

 

“I have to tell Hale about this, you know.  You’ve broken the chain of evidence, and I’m not taking the fall for that.”

 

“Does he _have_ to know?”  It sounds a little whiny, even to him.

 

An eloquently raised eyebrow is the only answer he gets.

 

“Well, then, at least let me finish looking at it?” he asks, turning what he’s got left of the charm.

 

“Fine,” she breathes.  “I have to go set Nestor’s arm.  You’d better be gone when I get back.”

 

Turning on the microscope, she heads for the door, throwing, “Don’t break anything,” over her shoulder.  “And don’t be here when I get back,” ghosts in from the hallway as the door closes behind her.

 

Dean doesn’t know what he thinks he’s going to see under the microscope, but the magnification at least verifies for him that there’s blood on the tips of the hairs, maybe Brenda’s but more likely the creature’s, who must’ve cut itself going through the broken basement window.

 

It isn’t much, but at least he knows that the thing can bleed.

 

Of course, the monster might not be the only one bleeding after tonight.  Dean puts the hair and the open evidence bag on the counter next to the microphone, shuts off the lights, and closes the door behind him, taking care to see that it locks.

 

He goes out the way he came, avoiding Tara and Nestor and the goddamned dog, trying not to remember the sound of canine nails scrabbling for purchase in the darkness.

 

By the time he hits the exterior door and strips the duct tape from the latch, he’s breathing a little harder than can strictly be explained by his stride, and he tells himself it’s got nothing to do with the ghosts of the past climbing up on him or the absence of his brother on the seat beside him as he pulls out of the duplex driveway and heads for home.

 

Tells himself that coming back to this life isn’t a mistake.

 

Jury’s still out on whether he’s a liar or not when he pulls up to his own garage and shuts the engine off.

 

*****

 

**Report Nineteen (Unedited)**

**First Charming Expeditionary Force**

**28 January 2012**

**Shaniko** **, Oregon** ****

**Chibs Telford, Navigator**

We should never have stopped for the woman. 

 

It’s always a woman that does it.  I told them that, but no one listens to me.  And I’ll admit, she was a good looking woman, tall and strong, curvy, big busted, with wild red hair spilling every which way.

 

Sure trouble, I said.

  
Damn me if I wasn’t right.

 

It isn’t much of a town, wasn’t Before, either.  But they’d managed to secure it with wrecked trailers and buses, sheet metal stripped from old buildings, and the like.  She was standing at the gate, you might call it, smiling and waving like we were the second coming of Christ himself.

 

Soon as we stopped and Jasper jumped out of the lead gunboat, men appeared on the barricade, guns pointed at us.  Probably, we could’ve taken all of them out with one sweep of the fifty, and smarter men might have bargained on us doing that, but these guys weren’t exactly smart.

  
Besides, we were supposed to be exploring what was left of America and getting information.  Killing the first new people we met was counter-productive, as Juice said.

 

Ope stepped half out of the Humvee and showed his empty hands, said, “We’re the First Charming Expeditionary Force, out of California, and we aren’t looking for trouble.”

 

A big guy with a big gun told us to back off the fifties, so Tammy Rae and Reno climbed inside and then everyone got out, slow and careful, hands up and empty, and then the guys on the barricade climbed down, and Miss Hot Stuff disappeared inside, and we waited.

 

Didn’t take long for them to invite us in.

 

Ope asked us what we thought, and we all figured we’d check out the town.  As long as they didn’t try to take our guns, we’d give them a chance.

 

The town itself looked like something out of the Old West—board sidewalks and swinging doors and big windows with wavy glass.

 

Juice whistled low as we passed a place with a horse tied up out front.  The sign over the door said, “Saloon,” and about six of us sort of crowed at that. 

 

“I’m Lemuel,” the big guy said.  “Welcome to Shaniko.”

 

We introduced ourselves around, and when it came to Tammy Rae and Grace, Lemuel let us know that women weren’t allowed out in the streets without a head covering.

  
“The sight of your naked hair is an offense to the Lord,” he said.

I knew we shouldn’t have stopped for the woman.

 

She came out then with two scarves, which she gave to Tammy Rae and Grace, who only put them on because Ope nodded like they should.

 

Then the woman, whose name is Sarah, asked Lemuel if she could take the women to bathe.

 

Ope refused, and that led to a wrangling match over who was in charge of “our” women.  I thought Tammy Rae was going to chew Lemuel’s face off.

 

As it ended up, the girls went with Sarah, but they kept their guns, which was the only way Ope would let them out of his sight.

  
Lemuel promised nothing would happen to them, and he was good as his word—no one tried anything.  We’d have known it because Grace and Tammy Rae would have killed anybody who tried it.  Those Army girls, they’re fierce.

 

Then Lemuel invited us for the midday meal, which they held in what must’ve been the town hall or something back in the Before.  The meal—venison stew, bread, squash, good stuff—was preceded by a lot of praying about salvation and earthly temptations and gratitude, and whatnot.  I stopped listening but I kept looking, which was when I noticed there weren’t any women in the mess hall.

 

That mystery was solved when the prayers ended and the women came in carrying stewpots and bread baskets and dishes full of food.  Tammy Rae and Grace came in then, too, but they didn’t serve the men.  They stood over to one side glowering like they’d burn the place down with all of us men in it, and when Ope gestured them over, Lemuel told him that women weren’t allowed at table with men.

 

Something about them being unclean.  I heard Tammy Rae’s voice coming loud from across the room, and Ope got up to go talk to the women, who gave him an earful about the situation in Shaniko.

 

Seems it was a sort of religious commune where women were treated like property and the men had total control over everything.  I found this out later, of course.

 

When Grace started to get loud—and Grace never gets loud—I figured we’d be gone before our food was cold on the plates, but Sarah came out of the kitchen then with her hair all bound up—shame, that—talking in a low voice and gesturing toward a room off to one side where the women apparently ate.

 

Sarah stepped away, and Ope said something to our ladies, and they agreed to go off with Sarah, but it was clear they didn’t like it one bit.

 

When Ope came back to the table, Jasper asked if things were okay, and Ope acted like it was just a misunderstanding, but I could see it bothered him, whatever he’d heard from our girls.

 

The Brethren, as they called themselves, didn’t take kindly to us being alone in the town, kept on us all the time and pretty close, and when they invited us to spend the night, I could see Ope didn’t really want to.  He told Lemuel to give us a minute on our own, out in the middle of the street where everyone could watch us but couldn’t overhear what we were saying.

 

You could see Lemuel didn’t like it, but he let us go.

 

Ope told us that the women of the town were property and lived in total obedience to the men.

 

“Slavery?” Reno asked, sounding like the rest of us were feeling.

 

Ope shook his head and said he guessed that’s what it was, but he didn’t sound certain.  Maybe the women liked it?  Maybe the men gave them protection and the women didn’t mind the trade-offs?

 

Some of us wanted to take care of the problem, liberate the women and the like.  Others thought it was none of our business; who were we to tell other people how to live?

 

At last, Ope decided we’d spend the night and see what it was like in the morning.  He ordered us to secure the vehicles, which we did, and to make sure we had access to our weapons.

 

Also, he wanted to talk to the girls, make sure they weren’t too far from the rest of us if something happened in the night.

 

Sleeping quarters arranged—we were housed in an old Quonset hut near the northern edge of town, the girls in a funny little building next door—we settled down for an afternoon of getting to know the neighbors, so to speak.

 

By lights out, everyone had had their fill of self-righteous bullshit, and we’d figured out that these people have nothing worth bargaining for, even if we wanted to, which we didn’t.

 

The crew was still trying to decide what to do, since our mission orders weren’t exactly clear on the whole interference issue. 

 

On the one hand, we wouldn’t—and didn’t—tolerate an upstart group trying to come into Charming and tell us how to govern ourselves and live our lives.

  
On the other hand, at least two of the women we caught a glimpse of at supper (leftovers from the midday meal) were sporting bruises and fat lips.

 

Of course, this led to a long wrangle on what constitutes an old lady and what authority her old man has over her.

 

We didn’t come to any decisions that night, but Ope said we’d have to decide come morning because we weren’t spending another day there.

 

Reno was going to go get the girls because they deserved a say, too, when he discovered that the doors were barred on the outside and we couldn’t get out.

 

We had our guns out and were trying to figure a way to escape the hut when we heard shooting outside and the next thing you know, Tammy Rae is swinging wide the front door.

 

Seems the girls had decided they didn’t like the way the men were looking at them and had just started sneaking out of their quarters when they noticed the Quonset hut doors were barred.

 

Lemuel and a couple of his boys were just heading our way when Tammy Rae and Grace escaped, and the girls did us proud by plugging two of the bastards and keeping the third pinned down until we were sprung.

We thought we were in for a real firefight and were already looking for cover and trying to find a way to our convoy when Sarah came out with the ladies of the town and every gun they could get their hands on.

 

You could’ve blown Lemuel over with a stiff breath.

 

Seems our visit was all it took to show the women of Shaniko another way.  Once we’d rounded up all the men of the town, it became clear the men had been living on borrowed time anyway.  There were only two dozen of them but at least three times as many women.

 

Ope gave the ladies the option of coming with us as far as Yakima, but Sarah stepped right up, took off her headwrap, shook out her hair, and said, “No, I think we’ve got it under control.  These jerk-offs won’t be bothering us for a good long while.”

 

She sounded just like Gemma.

 

We had an honor guard to the convoy, and they threw the gates wide for us so we could roll through Shaniko, right past the former lords of the manor, who were all down on their knees looking mighty small.

 

It was a good day.

 

*****

 

 _Sometimes, no matter which choice you make, you’re in the shit when it all goes down.  Life’s like a road that way.  Some roads seem clear but turn out bad.  Others look shitty from the start but work out okay.  The mistake is in thinking that life has a map that means a good goddamn.  It doesn’t.  You can’t predict a thing by looking ahead.  All you can do is figure out where you’ve been and whether or not that’s got any bearing on where you’d like to end up._ (Letters 26:19-27)

 

“Did you have to break into Tara’s lab?”

 

Jax is on his second cup of coffee, over the remains of an uncomfortable breakfast, when he finally breaks the tense silence that’s been hanging between them since Dean dropped the latest bomb.

 

Dean shrugs.  “I didn’t think she’d just let me look at the evidence without Hale’s say-so, and I didn’t ask her up front because I didn’t want to put her in a position where she had to choose between you and her duty as a doctor.  You know how Tara is.”

 

Jax looks at Dean.  He does know Tara, has known her since they were kids.  But here’s Dean reminding Jax of things he seems to have forgotten, like how seriously Tara takes her oath to do no harm.

 

And how stubborn Dean can be.

 

“And she just let you look at the evidence?  Just like that?”

 

Dean shrugs again.  “Harm was already done.  She had to tell Hale, so what difference did it make if that was before or after I actually examined what I came there to examine?”

 

Jax can see that, can see Tara finding a way between her duty and her desire to help Dean and Jax.

 

The idea of the two people who know Jax best in the world working together makes him shiver a little.  He should be glad Dean broke into the lab. 

 

Of course, he’s not happy about Dean getting caught.

 

“Hey,” Dean protests when Jax points out Dean’s blunder on that count.  “I’d’ve been fine if it weren’t for that damned dog.”

 

“Hale’s going to be _pissed_ ,” Jax says tiredly, taking another long swig of coffee. 

 

Dean pours him a third cup and says, “Yeah, but what can he do, either?  Harm’s done, like I said.  And what’s he going to do—put me in jail?”

 

Jax gives Dean a long once-over, making it clear that he’s imagining Dean in prison clothes.

 

“No way.”  Dean answers Jax’s unspoken suggestion firmly.  “We can make our own fun.  I am _not_ going to jail just so you can get off on me behind bars.”

 

“I can get off on you anywhere,” Jax notes, taking a coy sip of his coffee.

 

“Yeah, well, we have a bigger problem than where I end up in your fantasies.”

 

Dean’s tone sobers Jax up, and he nods, picking at a crust of bread on his plate and considering what Dean had told him about the evidence.

 

“And it’s definitely not a werewolf?”  Jax knows the answer, but he can’t let go of wishful thinking.  At least werewolves were a known factor. 

 

_Jesus, when did werewolves become the good option?_

 

“Nah, I’ve never heard of an albino werewolf.  I’ll swing by the Club and check Dad’s book before I hit the hospital, but I’m pretty sure a werewolf in human form would still be an albino.  And we would have noticed if we had an albino in Charming.”

 

Jax snorts.  “I’m not so sure.  We have a giant white-haired monster running around and no one’s noticed _that_.”

 

“Hey,” Dean says.  “People see what they want to see, and they tend to overlook what they can’t explain.  Hell, I had witnesses who’d say to my face that there was nothing unusual going on even as a spirit was writing, ‘Die, bitch, die’ on the mirror behind them.”

 

“Shit, really?”

 

Dean nods.  “Tuscaloosa.  Another time, in Bay City…”

 

Dean goes still, shuts down right in front of Jax.

 

“What is it?” Jax asks, quelling the urge to reach out and touch Dean’s arm.  Sometimes when Dean gets like this, he doesn’t want comfort.

 

“It’s just…I haven’t thought about this shit in a long time.  Any of it.”

 

“Your brother?” Jax treads lightly, wondering if he’s pushing, wondering if Dean will let him in this time.

 

“Yeah.  And my dad.  We did the Tuscaloosa job together while Sam was in college.  He went to Stanford.  Did I ever tell you that?”

 

“No,” Jax answers, keeping his surprise out of his voice.  If he wants Dean to keep talking, he can’t act like it’s a big deal that he is.  “He must’ve been really smart.”

 

“He was,” Dean nods, tracing the rim of his coffee cup with his finger, eyes sometime far away from the table where they’re sitting.

 

When Dean looks back up, there’s a moment of what he’s really feeling scrawled across his face, and it makes Jax want to do something girly that he’ll never live down.  Instead, he waits, holding Dean’s eyes, watching Dean erase the expression and pack the feelings away, put them somewhere once again out of reach of Jax, who feels like he’s losing something he might never get back.

 

Which is ridiculous.  Dean is right here.  He spends his mornings here over coffee and breakfast, his nights beside Jax in the bed that they share.  It doesn’t matter that parts of Dean are untouchable.  The parts Jax can touch are pretty fucking amazing.

 

And it’s not like Jax himself is some kind of chatterbox when it comes to talking about how he feels.

  
 _So leave it_ , he tells himself, _and get on with the day_.

 

“So you’re going to the Club and then the hospital.  Anyplace else?”

 

Dean scrutinizes Jax, and it makes him realize what he’s just asked, how it might sound to Dean.  He holds up a placating hand.  “Hey, no.  I’m not asking as the leader of Charming.  Just as your husband.  Will you be around for dinner?”

 

“Should be,” Dean says, “Why?  You cooking?”

 

That makes Jax laugh, as it usually does.  They both know that it’d be less wasteful to just throw food away than to let Jax cook it.

 

“Nah, thought I’d take you out tonight.  Friday’s pie night at Miriam’s.”

 

It’s one of the many things Jax loves about Dean that his eyes inevitably light up when he hears the word “pie.”

 

Then Dean’s eyes narrow suspiciously.  “What’s your real reason for taking me out?  Trying to prove to people that I’m not a nutjob?  That I can be trusted not to break into their houses looking for monsters?”

 

Dean’s tone is light, but Jax knows better than to buy it.  Dean’s serious, and it drives the wind out of Jax to realize that Dean still thinks this way, even about him.

 

“No,” he says carefully—too carefully.  Dean’s shoulders stiffen.  “I thought it’d be nice to get out, spend some time together.  Maybe I thought it’s good for the public to see us out and about, show them how good it can be.  But I wasn’t thinking anything beyond that.”

  
He pauses, calculating how far he can take it.

 

 _Fuck it_.

 

“Besides, I’m not the real politician at this table.”

 

Dean’s quick laugh surprises Jax, though the bitterness in it doesn’t.

  
“Yeah, okay,” Dean says wearily, as if he hasn’t just woken from a sound six hours of sleep.  “Guess I earned that.  Sorry.”

 

“No problem.  Just…try to remember that I’m on your side, okay?”

 

Dean hesitates, like he’s going to say something other than the, “I know,” he finally settles on.

 

Maybe Jax should push it, but he’s gotten away with a lot lately, and hell, sharing is overrated anyway.  They do pretty well with repressing and compartmentalizing.  No sense stirring up shit that’ll only make them both miserable.

  
Besides, Dean will get around to saying it eventually if he really needs to.

Instead, Jax says, “I’ll meet you here at seven, make the reservations for seven-thirty.  That work?”

 

Dean nods and answers, “Yeah, sounds good,” before rising and moving to the bedroom to finish getting ready for the day.

 

Jax pauses while washing his and Dean’s breakfast dishes, considering how far they seem to have come in this whole relationship gig.  It’s not like they’re exactly poster children for healthy communication, but nevertheless, they seem closer than they’ve ever been, and it’s not just because they’re sharing the same space.

 

“I’m taking off.”  Dean interrupts Jax’s thought process, and by the time he comes back from kissing Dean breathless in the open front door—a habit he could get used to, complete with catcalls from Liz next door—he’s lost the train of thought and is happy enough to leave it wandering off the track.

 

There’s only so much navel-gazing a king can afford, after all.

 

He’d planned to review Trisha Weaver’s water quality report this morning and then spend some time with Lom and Meghan Tso, their biggest dairy and beef farmers, but given the morning’s revelations, he figures he should do damage control.

 

He doesn’t really feel like taking Hale’s shit, so he goes to the Sheriff’s Office first, wanting to get it out of the way. 

 

Of course, his next stop is the hospital, and that’s not exactly going to be a milk run, either.

 

Turns out not to be a problem, since Tara is talking with Hale when Jax walks in.

  
They turn identical disapproving looks on Jax, who has to will himself not to duck his head like a guilty schoolboy.  He’s King of the Fucking World.

 

And he has plausible deniability. 

 

Sort of.

 

“Hey, Dean just told me what happened last night.”

 

Tara opens her mouth, but it’s Hale’s words that get to Jax first.  “Did you sanction his evidence tampering?  Did you give him permission to investigate the McClellan case, never mind my orders to the contrary?”

 

“Orders?”  Jax had had every intention of eating crow here, but Hale’s tone rankles.  The guy’s a self-righteous prick, and Jax suddenly feels inclined to knock him from his high horse.  “You saying you gave _me_ an order?”

 

Ordinarily, Jax doesn’t throw his weight around.  He prefers to let things play out the way they’re meant to.  But this time…

 

The look on Hale’s face—disgust at having to kowtow, fear at having stepped on Jax’s toes, impatience with not having entire freedom to do his job—that’s worth whatever political beating Jax might take later for pulling the King card now.

And for pulling it in front of Tara, who’s the bigger problem here, no matter how big the stick up Hale’s ass is.

 

“If you think it’s in the best interest of Charming to circumvent the regular enforcement of the law or to undermine the authority of this office, you’ve—.”  
  


“Woah, woah, wait a goddamned minute.”  He takes the Lord’s name in vain deliberately, liking the way it screws Hale’s face up.

 

“First of all, I didn’t authorize Dean to do anything.  He’s on his own on this one.  He’s not representing the Sons or me.  Second, I didn’t tell anyone what happened last night, and I’m pretty sure Nestor knows better than to run his mouth, so unless you or the good doctor here has been telling tales, I don’t see how this has to get out to the people of Charming.  Third, if I had given Dean the go-ahead, it’d be because I’ve got the ‘best interest of Charming’ in mind.” 

 

He leaves ‘which is more than can be said for you’ right off that sentence, but it hangs there in the air between them anyway.

 

“It’s high time you learned that you can’t do whatever you want around here, Mr. Teller.”  Hale spreads his chest, hands on his hip in the classic cop pose.

 

Too bad for him it stopped intimidating Jax when he was nine.

 

“Actually, I can, but good thing for you I don’t.”

 

There’s no question it’s a threat, and Tara takes a half-step so that her shoulder is between Jax and Hale.  She’s facing Jax, trying to get his attention with her eyes, but he’s ignoring her for the time being because Hale is turning an interesting shade of red and Jax feels kind of proud of himself for it.

 

Not exactly the best leadership model, but right now, it’s working for Jax.

 

“Look, Hale, I don’t see why you’re getting all bent out of shape.  The evidence wasn’t harmed, was it?”  This he directs at Tara, who says, “No,” quickly, even while her brow furrows at being forced into aiding and abetting Jax, with whom she has her own bone or 206 to pick.

 

“So there you go.  No harm, no foul.”

 

“No foul, huh?  Why don’t you ask Cheryl Wentworth about our late night visitor?  Here to pick up an envelope I left him, conveniently on my desk?”

 

Shit.  Dean hadn’t mentioned that to him.

 

His confusion must show on his face because Hale starts to deflate a little, his own expression reflecting some confusion.

 

“You didn’t know?”

 

“No.  I didn’t.  Just like I didn’t know about the lab, either.  I told you:  Dean isn’t working for the Sons or me.  He’s doing this under his own power.  For what it’s worth, though, you should probably listen to him.  He knows a hell of a lot more about this shit than you do.”

“I know how to do my job, Mr. Teller.”

 

Jax wonders fleetingly if he ever gets nosebleeds from being so high up in his saddle.

 

“Whatever.  Just don’t come crying to me—or Dean—when this whatever-it-is starts tearing up your town and people start complaining that you aren’t protecting them.”

 

“As you keep pointing out, it’s your town.”

 

“Yeah,” Jax says, slow, nasty smirk on his face.  “But I’m not an elected official.  Leastways, not elected by the people of Charming.”

 

Deciding he’s had enough fun—and burned this bridge a little too long—Jax takes his leave without another parting shot.

  
Tara follows him out, hand on his arm as he reaches his bike, parked nose-in at the curb in front of the cop-shop, right in the red no-parking zone.

 

She smirks at the obvious symbolism of his parking job, and he glows a little at the way she always gets him.

 

“Don’t think a charming smile is going to save your ass this time, Jax Teller.  You played me.  You knew damned well Dean was going to end up in my lab.”

 

Jax has never been able to lie to Tara, so when he looks her in the eye and says, “No, I didn’t,” she can tell he means it.

  
“Really?”  Her doubt is not particularly good for his ego, but he figures he’s earned it.

 

“Really.  I suspected he was going to Hale’s, but I didn’t know there was evidence at the hospital.”

 

“You don’t care that he broke into my lab, though, do you?”

 

Shit.

  
“Not particularly, no,” he answers, swinging his leg over the seat and taking his helmet from the handlebar, strapping it on as he talks to her.

 

“So you have so little respect for me—.”

 

“Hey, hey, wait a minute.  No.  You know it’s not like that.  Dean had to see that evidence.  You wouldn’t have broken chain of command.  Way I see it, he saved you from a moral dilemma.”

 

“That’s the ‘way you see it,’ huh?”

 

He can tell by her expression that he’s just lost more than this battle, but he can’t tell what it might be or whether or not he’ll miss it now that it’s gone.

 

“You aren’t asking me to choose.”  Jax states it as fact because he knows better.

 

“You did that a long time ago,” Tara confirms.

  
“Well, what _are_ you asking me, Tara?”

 

“I guess I’m wondering what lengths you’ll go to for Dean.”

 

“Bullshit.  That’s bullshit.  This isn’t about anything but your hurt feelings.  You want things both ways, and you can’t have them.  Either I ask your permission and put you in a bind, or I sneak around behind your back and lie to your face.  No way I can win.  No way Dean can, either.”

 

Tara nods at the ground, a habit he remembers from countless blow-outs back in the wild days when they couldn’t get enough of each other, love it or hate it.

 

“Look, I’m sorry, okay?  I didn’t mean for you to get put in the middle of this thing.  But there’s a real monster out there, Tara, and—.”

 

“I know.”  Something in her tone makes Jax look more carefully at her.

 

“You found something?”

 

She shakes her head, shrugs, looks down again, only this time he can tell she’s thinking.  “Or, I guess, I didn’t find something I should have.  I don’t have the facilities or the time to run DNA on an unknown sample when we’ve got nothing to compare it against, but I know human hair when I see it, and this hair wasn’t human.  Wasn’t synthetic, either.  Definitely has cells.  So it’s…an unknown…creature’s?”  She struggles with the nomenclature, always one for wanting names, labels.

 

“Monster,” Jax supplies firmly.  She looks profoundly uncomfortable at that word, far as it is outside of what she knows and understands.  But Tara’s a scientist through and through, and she can’t argue with the evidence of her eyes.

 

“Okay.  Monster.  Do we know what kind?”

 

It’s Jax’s turn to shake his head.  “No, but Dean’s tracking it.  If anyone can find it, it’s him.”

 

She’s quiet for a minute, considering.  Then she looks right at him and says, “Kind of sucks for you, doesn’t it.”  It’s not actually a question, but Jax knows what she’s asking.

 

He’s always hated being helpless in the face of things he can’t control, especially when someone he loves is at risk.

 

“Yeah,” he says slowly, rubbing his chin, a reflex from the old days.  “Yeah, it does.”

 

“You be careful, Jax Teller.  And you tell Dean to be careful, too.”

 

“We good?” he asks.  He has no right to ask it, not really.  But she answers, “Of course,” and smiles, not the wide open, eyes-bright smile he remembers, but a genuine, warm smile anyway.

 

He pulls her into a one-armed hug, kisses the top of her head.

 

“Take care.”

“You, too.  Both of you.”

 

He raises a hand in farewell as he walks the bike back and starts it, heading for the Clubhouse and the water quality report.  It promises to be riveting reading. 

 

Ah, the glamorous life of the world leader.

 

*****

 

 _I’ll tell you one thing:  The road ends.  Not always in an ocean or a mountain or at the edge of a steep drop-off, but it ends.  There’s some comfort in that._ (Letters 33:3-5)

 

Dean doesn’t hear Jax come in because he’s heavy into some of Dad’s more obscure notes about skinwalkers.  Not that he thinks their monster is this particular kind.  In fact, he’d ruled it out twenty minutes ago.

 

No, he’s just appreciating his father’s methodical analysis, his laboring over minutia.  Dean used to get impatient with his dad, always anxious to go and find and kill.  Sam was the researcher in the family, the one who’d spend hours scrolling newspapers on microfilm or charming ancient librarians into letting him look at the restricted town archives.

 

Not that Dean couldn’t do research.  He’d learned.  You didn’t grow up in John Winchester’s shadow without learning to do what the man told you to do.

 

But he’d never liked it, and he’d never truly appreciated it until right now, when he’s got drastically limited resources and no fucking clue.

 

So while Dad’s notes on skinwalkers aren’t helpful in the specifics, the general nature of them, their associations, do help—they help him to focus, to figure out what he might try next, to ask the question, “What would John Winchester do?” without a trace of irony.

 

“Anything?” Jax asks from the door, and Dean jumps, finger holding his place reflexively as he takes in Jax, who’s leaning casually in the doorway, looking for all the world like he’s been there for hours.

 

“Been there long?”

  
“Long enough to know you move your lips when you read.”

 

“Shut up,” Dean says fondly as Jax moves into the Chapel and closes the door behind him.

 

“So?”  He prompts when he’s seated, reaper grinning up at him like it already knows the answer.

 

“Nothing.  Yet.”

 

“Looked pretty engrossing for ‘nothing,’” Jax observes lightly. 

 

Dean shrugs, feeling strangely exposed.  “Just thinking.”

 

“Okay,” Jax answers, letting it go. 

 

“Everything okay on your end?”

 

Jax laughs and tips back in his chair.  “Oh, yeah.  Just had a great powwow with Tara and Hale.”

 

Dean winces, hesitates. Should he ask? 

 

“It’s fine,” Jax follows up, waving his hand.  “You’re cool.”

 

“So, no jailhouse role-play?”  Dean leers.

Jax laughs, “No, but Hale let me borrow a pair of handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit.”

 

They share a longer laugh then, the kind that lovers share, the kind that says the rest of the world can go fuck itself for a few precious moments.

 

Then they hear Bobby shout through the Chapel door, “Dean!  Jax!”

 

Almost in unison they rise and move toward the door, both muttering, “Shit,” under their breath, the urgency of Bobby’s voice clear even through the muffling wood of the heavy door.

 

“There’s been another attack,” Bobby says, holding the phone out to Jax, who takes it, listens, locks eyes with Dean.

  
Dean sees death in Jax’s eyes, and he feels his stomach plummet.  He wasn’t fast enough or smart enough to catch this thing, and now it’s killed someone.

  
“Who?” he asks before the receiver has even reached the cradle.

 

“Meredith Evans.  Cedar Street. They’re waiting for us,” Jax adds.  “Both of us.”

 

Dean nods.  “I have to stop at the house.”

  
“It’s on the way,” Jax concedes.

 

“Let’s go.”

 

“Bobby, call the Tsos, tell them I have to reschedule.  I’ll drop by when I can to do that.” 

 

“You got it.”

 

“Thanks.”

 

Cedar Street is two blocks long, with a pocket park on one end, swings empty on this school day, and a defunct mom-and-pop at the other.  The houses are modest two-storey affairs, dormer windows on the second floor, shuttered picture windows in the living room overlooking neatly kept lawns and stately municipal trees.

  
It’s a nice street, the kind you would have found young families on Before.

 

Now it’s a chaos of concerned citizens, Army volunteers, and epileptic bubble lights, the Evans home easy to identify by the phalanx of men and women keeping the crowd back and the yellow tape strung between the trees and the hedges that bound each side of the immaculate green lawn.

 

Hale is standing on the front porch looking tight-lipped and a little green around the gills.  He gives Dean a hard look and doesn’t give Jax a look at all.

 

Clearly, they are deep in the doghouse.

 

“Bad?” Jax asks, and Dean can see what no one else there probably can, the strain around Jax’s eyes, the way he’s anxious about what they’re going to find.

Dean knows Jax has seen some terrible things, been a party to a few of them, but he also knows the kind of damage the human body can take from inhuman things.  Jax isn’t wrong to be worried about what he’s going to see inside.

 

Hale nods, more a jerk of the chin than an expression of acknowledgement, and stands aside.  It’s an indication of how it must be in there that he doesn’t say a word about tampering with evidence or keeping out of the way of the town’s single qualified forensics specialist, Becky, who’d been living in Charming for two years when the End began.

 

Jax goes first, though Dean is tempted to pull him back when he sees the first dark smear of viscera, ugly against the beige carpet in the hallway.

 

He keeps his hands to himself, though, because there are others in the house and because Jax will see this one way or the other.

 

The hallway leads to an open living room shaped by comfortable furniture in golds and deep reds, by rag rugs on polished oak floors, by the gelled remains of what must have once been a woman, draped like obscene modern art over the cobbler’s table that served as the centerpiece of the room.

  
Now, it’s an evil altar, upon which a woman’s dignity, beauty, and life have been flayed apart and strewn like wet streamers at the world’s most gruesome party.

 

“Jesus,” he hears Jax whisper.  It sounds like a prayer, and Dean can’t blame him.  He’s seen a lot of terrible things done to the human body, but this is something else, a profane celebration of death, and maybe only God can make it right.

 

“Tell me a person didn’t do this,” Jax says, turning away from what’s left of Meredith Evans.

 

“I’ll let you know,” Dean answers, touching Jax’s arm, just a graze, nothing that spells weakness. 

 

Jax nods tightly, starts to take a breath, thinks better of it—the stench is gag-inducing—and stands aside so that Dean can move closer to the body.

 

Body.

  
He’s got to think of it like that, think of it as an object, not a former person, just a pile of meat.  His father had taught him that on their first joint hunt, though it had taken him several more before he started to be able to put away the sense of sorrow and wrongness and just do the job.

 

Becky is working close to the table where the corpse is splayed.  She’s wearing the cement expression of someone who sees awful things for a living.  He appreciates that as he leans in to take a look at the scoring on the woman’s chest.

 

“Is that a nail?”  He asks, pointing at the deepest gouge, where he can see bone glinting through muscle.

 

“Yes, I think so,” she answers a minute after plucking the nail from the wound and holding up to the light to examine it.  She bags and tags it and moves back to the work she’d been doing near the abdomen, which has been raked open.  Intestines like spoiled sausage boil out of the wound, black ichor staining the remains of her panties, an incongruous pink with white flowers.

 

“She wasn’t raped?”

 

Becky gives Dean a look, then, like she’s trying to figure his reason for asking. Something she sees in his face reassures her that he’s not a sicko.

 

“No.  Doesn’t seem like the motive was sexual.  There’s no evidence of ejaculation, for example.”

 

Dean pulls a face and spares a glance for the floor around the body.  How she’d be able to tell if there were, he doesn’t know.  The rug beneath the table is soaked with blood, squelching as he shifts his weight and leans in to get a closer look at her left cheek.

 

He can see her teeth through the hole in the side of her face, where the flesh has been eaten away like a cored apple. 

 

“Teeth marks?” he asks, pointing at an area on the lower jaw.

  
“Yes,” she answers, giving him another look, this one suggesting that she prefers to do her work uninterrupted.

 

“Sorry.  One more question:  Human?”

 

She shakes her head, lets out a careful breath.  “The Doc’ll have to confirm it, but I don’t think so.  See the way the lower bite slopes inward, like the thing’s got a nasty overbite?”

 

“Yeah,” and he does, now that she’s pointing it out.  “You know of an animal that might have that kind of bite?”

 

She shrugs, shakes her head, stares off into the cleaner space of the ceiling, where only the occasional arterial spray mars the wedding cake white stucco.  “Maybe a monkey?  I’m not sure.  Not my area of expertise.  You need a zoologist.”

 

Yeah, because they have a surplus of those in Charming.

 

Dean goes back to his examination, leaving Becky to her work.  He’s careful to stay out of her way as she moves around the body.  It’s like a slow-motion dance of seduction, all sidestepping and averted eyes, and after ten minutes of tension, Dean decides he’s seen enough.  Nothing popped on the EMF, not that he’d expected it to, and there’s no sign of sulfur.

  
Whatever this creature is, it doesn’t seem to be demonic.  Just evil.

  
“Thanks, Becky,” he says at last. 

 

She gives him a wan smile, then, genuine but weak, and he makes a half-wave as he clears the living room door.

 

There, he asks one of the Sheriff’s guys, maybe Buck?  Bud?  He doesn’t know, and it hardly matters right now.  “Any idea of how it got in?”

 

The guy doesn’t even question Dean’s word choice, just gestures wearily to a door ajar in the kitchen, through which Dean can just make out a set of descending stairs.

“Basement window.”

  
The deputy just nods.

  
“Thanks,” Dean says, moving on.

 

Jax is waiting halfway down the short hallway to the front door, and they walk out together, pausing so they can take full, clear breaths of the cool winter air.

 

Hale approaches, stiff-legged and wooden-faced.

 

“What is it?” he asks, voice low, vibrating with anger—at the destruction of a life, at his own helplessness, at having to concede that there are things in his world he can’t predict or control and that aren’t remotely human.

 

At Dean for being the harbinger of ugly news.

 

“I don’t know,” Dean has to answer, and he hates it.  “But I’ll find out.”  He tries to make it sound like a promise he can keep, but from the shifting darkness of the Sheriff’s expression, Dean’s pretty sure he fails to sound anything but pathetic.

 

Without another word to Hale, they walk the gauntlet of spectators, ignoring questions until Jax says, “Shit,” under his breath and stops long enough to put his hand up, which almost immediately quiets the crowd.

 

“We can’t give you any details at the risk of compromising Sheriff Hale’s investigation.”

 

“Is it a monster?”

 

Dean is careful to let nothing show on his face.  He waits for Jax’s answer and wonders what it will be.

 

“We’re not sure what happened to Meredith Evans, only that she’s dead.  We’d ask that as a precaution you keep your doors and windows locked.  The Army and the Sheriff’s Office will be increasing patrols, both in frequency and in number.  When we have any information that we can share, you’ll be the first to know.”

 

“Is Dean going to help with the investigation?”

 

That’s a little too close for comfort, and Dean seeks out the interrogator, searching the mob of worried faces for one that looks especially smug or suspiciously neutral.

  
Nothing.

 

“He may offer his help if the time comes for that,” Jax deflects.  “Right now, we’ve got things to do, and I’m sure you do, too.  Why don’t you clear out, let the cops do their jobs?”

 

The crowd sways and starts to disperse, the die-hards and busybodies staying put but edging away from Jax and Dean, who slide into the Impala almost as one and give a sigh of relief in unison.

  
This is followed by the kind of laughter that brings with it a release of nervous tension.  It doesn’t last long, and then they’re staring soberly out at the well-kept lawn and the neat house and the swarm of cops and Army volunteers, seeing nothing but the body inside, what’s left of a life that must have been special to someone, if only to the victim herself.

 

“Defensive wounds?” Jax asks after a few minutes of heavy silence, punctuated only by tired breaths.

 

“No,” Dean answers.  He’d checked.  “She didn’t have a chance to fight back.  Whatever it is, it’s fast and vicious.”

 

“And hungry.”

 

Dean had thought of that too.  “No, I don’t think so.  I’ll have to check with Tara after she does the autopsy, but I’m willing to bet that most of her organs are there—maybe slashed up or whatever, but not chewed.  The face thing is something else.  I don’t think it was trying to eat her, exactly… .”  He shakes his head, unable to put to words the sense he got from what he saw.

 

“So you’re no closer to figuring out what it is?”

 

Jax doesn’t sound accusatory, but Dean can’t help but feeling that he’s letting Jax down. This is what he does—did—whatever.  He hunts evil.  This thing is evil, of that there’s no doubt.  But so far, it’s miles ahead of Dean, and he’s not gaining any ground.

 

“No.  But I will.”

 

“Hey,” Jax says then, reaching out a hand to turn Dean’s head toward him.  “I know you will.”  And with no regard at all for the people milling around just beyond the hood of the Impala, Jax kisses Dean long and deep, until they both come up gasping.  Dean’s lips are buzzing and feel swollen and his jeans are suddenly too tight.

 

“You keep distracting me like that, I’m going to have a hard time getting any work done.”

 

“You’re going to have a hard time either way,” Jax counters, smirking.

 

Dean gives it the laugh it deserves—dirty, with a promise at the tail end—and then starts the car and turns her around, planning to drop Jax off at the Clubhouse, where he can pick up his bike.

 

He comes in for a quick sandwich, realizing that breakfast was a long time ago and the dinner date promised that morning is now just a distant, fond dream, and to call Edda Oronomo, Charming’s librarian, to see if she’d be willing to open the library for him. 

 

Since Edda is 72 and alone except for the patrons of her little library, she’s always happy to have an excuse to open, and she’s waiting in front of the glass doors with a smile on her face and a plate of cookies in her hand.

 

“I thought there was no eating allowed in the library,” Dean jibes gently, but he’s happy to take the cookies when she gives him a sly wink and ushers him into the dark building.

 

A perusal of the limited section on the occult and supernatural turns up nothing helpful, and when he explains to Edda what he’s interested in, she suggests Native American legends.

 

“The Modoc were hereabouts for thousands of years,” she explains, leading him to a section on Native American folklore.  Here, he finds a book that makes reference to a Bigfoot-like creature, the Matah Kagmi, but though he reads the two stories in the collection through twice, he can’t quite reconcile the docile, even helpful creature of Modoc lore with the vicious beast that ripped Meredith Evans apart.

 

Sighing, Dean turns with reluctance to researching local history.  Soon, he’s ensconced in the microfilm room going through back copies of the _Charming Record_ , looking for any evidence

 

By the quality of the light in the library, Dean knows it must be dusk when he finally finds a reference to a case in 1933 of an Okie family found torn to pieces in an orchard to the north of town. 

 

Dean makes a copy of the article, takes some notes in his case journal, and spends another half hour searching the papers six months to either side of the murders, but he finds nothing else—no similar attacks, no update on the investigation, no arrest.

 

Resigning himself to further research tomorrow, Dean packs up his scant findings—the folklore book, the article copy, his notes—thanks Edda, and heads for Grady’s.

 

Maybe it’s time he brought in another hunter on this.  He’d thought about it before, of course, but with so little to go on, he hadn’t figured it was worth it to bother the old man.  Now, though, with a theory turning itself over in his tired brain, Dean thinks it’s time to share.

 

He hasn’t called ahead, so he stops at the end of Grady’s driveway and honks twice, waits, honks a third time, long.  It’s a pre-arranged signal so he doesn’t earn a chest-full of salt rounds by surprising him.  Once a hunter, always a hunter, Grady’s fond of saying.

  
Of course, Grady thinks Dean has gotten a little soft.  He doesn’t say as much, but there’s a certain suspicion in his eyes lately that suggests Dean has somehow betrayed the hunter code.

  
The porch light comes on and an arm waves out the door, inviting Dean in.

 

Inside, the hunter’s place is neatly kept, even Spartan, nothing in the living room but a couple of lounge chairs, a beat-up old couch, and a coffee table, on which are a crossbow, Glock .45, and a spindle-spined copy of _The Grapes of Wrath_.

 

“Wondered when you’d show up,” he remarks, waving Dean into a chair and taking the other for himself.  “This about the monster killing girls?”

 

It’s only the one woman, but Dean doesn’t correct him.  Could just as well be two by tomorrow morning.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“You know what it is?”

 

“I have an idea, but it’s not making sense, and I wanted to bounce it off of you.”

 

Grady nods.  “Shoot.”

 

“So there’s a Modoc legend about a Bigfoot creature, the Matah Kagmi.  Right size, right height, sometimes described as changing color with the seasons.  But these things are peaceful.  In the legends, they never hurt anyone.  In fact, there’s one about a guy who gets bitten by a snake, and the creature saves him.  Not exactly the shred-‘em-till-they’re-dead type.”

 

“So, you thinking rogue?”

 

Dean shakes his head.  “I don’t know.  I think it’s got to be more than that.  Both women were attacked in their homes.  This thing had to get inside.  In fact, it seems smart enough to know that it can crawl through a basement window and go upstairs to meet the lady of the house.  Seems too calculated for a random attack, you know?  And in the legends I found, the monster stayed outdoors, never came inside, and avoided people if it could.”

 

Dean stops, something hitting him then.  “Except when people moved into its territory.  Miners.  Hunters.  Displaced Indians running from the reservation.”

 

“Charming’s been here a long time,” Grady observes mildly, not judging but not helping, either.  He seems content to let Dean run the rope out, maybe hang himself with it.  It reminds Dean a lot of Dad, an aspect of his father’s nature he’d never appreciated.

  
He doesn’t like hoops, no matter who’s telling him to jump.

 

“Yeah, but there are things up in the hills, out beyond our borders, that weren’t here before.  The remnants of the super-Freaks, flocks of bloodthirsty crows, Scavengers.  Hell, even Survivors might disturb the natural order of things when they’re looking for food or something.  I don’t know.  Just seems like this Modoc monster is our best bet.”

 

Grady shakes his head.  “What about the God thing?”  He’s relentless in requiring details, another Dad-like quality, and Dean feels a pang of loneliness, unexpected and sharp.  He’d forgotten what it was like, this brotherhood of loners.

 

Dean had already considered the question of the great gatekeeper of Charming, of course. 

 

“I think,” he says slowly, struggling for words.  He doesn’t talk about God very often.  Or ever.  “Maybe because this monster is original to Charming or the region or whatever.  Maybe God only fries the evil that wants in.  Maybe the evil that’s already here gets a pass.”

 

Grady shakes his head then.  “It’s my understanding that there was a big cleansing at the beginning of the End.”

 

Dean nods.  “Yeah, that’s true.  But if the monster is native to this place, maybe it predates the current definitions of good and evil. Or maybe it wasn’t evil to begin with and something set it off.”

 

“Like those other times?”

 

Dean considers this for a long span of minutes, punctuated by the clock over Grady’s couch, which keeps time like a slave-driver, all noise and impatience.

 

“The Okie family that was killed had come in from out of state, looking for work.  This whole area must’ve been crawling with migrants back then.”

 

Grady gives a grudging dip of his chin in approval.

“I’m not sure what might’ve been going on in ’51.  Maybe a housing development?  I could find out, I guess.”

 

“Say your theory’s true.  Why now?  What’s happening now?”

 

“I think the more important question is, ‘Why these women?’” Dean answers, frustrated by all the ifs and maybes in this conversation.  It’d be simpler if they could just trap the thing and kill it, but without knowing the answers to these questions, there’s little hope of that.

 

“What started it?” Grady adds, and the question breaks the cycle of Dean’s frustrated thoughts. 

 

“Good question.  I can talk to Brenda, see what she remembers, what she was doing when the thing came after her.”

 

Grady’s approving nod shouldn’t fill Dean with a warm pride, but it does. 

 

“When you figure it out, what are you going to do?”  They both know Grady already knows the answer, but Dean says it anyway, a kind of anthem of the hunter.

  
“Hunt this fucker down and kill it.”

 

“I’m in.”

 

Dean knows that if he looked in a mirror, the gleam in Grady’s eyes would be identical to the one in his own.

 

That sense of grim purpose lasts until he’s three minutes into questioning Brenda McClellan for a second time.  The woman is better, though her bruises have gotten to the green stage that makes them look worse, and she’s moving stiffly and carefully, like any sudden motion might kill her.

  
Dean winces in sympathy as she tries to get more comfortable against the pillows stacked up behind her.  Broken ribs suck.

 

But though she’s clearer-headed and obviously trying to be helpful, Brenda’s answers aren’t actually illuminating much that Dean didn’t already know.

 

“Okay, look.  Don’t focus on the attack itself,” he advises patiently.  “Think about what you were doing before it happened.  You said you’d walked into the kitchen to make some tea.  Where were you before in the house?”

 

“The—the bathroom.”  She blushes and shifts painfully once more.

 

 _Well, this is awkward_ , Dean thinks.  Aloud, he says, “Anything in particular happen in the, uh, bathroom?”

 

 _You can’t be serious_ , her look clearly says, but Dean pushes on.  “Look, no, I don’t mean, uh… .  Just, out of the ordinary or…?”  He inserts a hand gesture to indicate “et cetera.”  He’s floundering here, no hope of land in sight.

 

“Well…uh…I had my…  I was…  I had my period,” she admits at last.  Her face is bright red to the tips of her ears, and Dean sympathizes, pretty sure he’s red, too.

  
“Okay, well, good.  Good.  That…helps.” 

 

And actually, it might.  Dean knows there are monsters attracted to a woman’s menstrual fluid.  Witches, for example, use it in ritual.  And in the wilderness, there are sometimes animals that will be attracted to women who are bleeding.

 

Blood seems a good catalyst for a vicious attack.

 

“Okay…good,” he says again, “Anything else you can think of?”

 

But they’d been over things twice already, and it doesn’t seem a third time will produce anything new.

 

After wishing Brenda a quick recovery, Dean goes to find Tara, having some questions about the second victim, but she’s actually in surgery.  So he heads up to the children’s ward to see if Whit’s awake.  The kid is reading a comic book and looks a little better, more color in his cheeks, shadows under the eyes fading.

 

“Hey, man, sorry I haven’t been by in awhile.”

 

“No problem.  I heard you were working on the attacks.  Pretty harsh stuff, huh?”

 

The last thing he wants to bring into this kid’s life is the shit he’s seen out there, so he changes the subject, talking about how far Sam’s gotten on the ’88.

 

When dinner comes, the aid brings a tray for Dean, too, and he and the kid eat and talk until Dean sees signs that Whit is tired and trying to hide it.

 

“I’ll come back soon, okay?”  
  
“You’d better.  I want to hear all about the monster when you catch it.”

 

“You got it,” he promises, though already in his head he’s amending the promise. 

 

On his way to Recovery, he hears, “Dean,” and turns to find Wendy standing there, hands in her nurse’s smock pockets.

  
“Hey, Wendy.  Everything okay?” By her expression, things aren’t, not by a long shot.

  
She shakes her head, opens her mouth, tries to say something, and when she can’t, he puts a hand on her shoulder and turns her gently toward an empty room.

 

“I’m losing him, Dean,” she manages after a visible effort to gather herself.  “He’s not sleeping, won’t eat.  He just drinks and talks to himself, all the time now, and rocks in that damned chair in the backyard.  I don’t know what to do.”

 

“Look, Wendy, Chuck’s sensitive, you know?  The things he sees get to him.  He can’t function with all that noise in his head.  My brother, Sam, when he had visions, it messed him up for days, and he only had them once in awhile.  Chuck’s lived with this for years.  I’m telling you, he’s going to pull through, but I’ll swing by and see him soon as I can, alright?  I’ll see if I can’t get him to lay off the bottle.  And maybe Tara can prescribe something to help him sleep?”

 

Tara shakes her head.  “I tried that.  She won’t prescribe anything because of his drinking.  Says it might kill him.”

 

 _Yeah, that figures_ , Dean thinks.  “I’ll come by.  Tonight if I can, if not, as soon as I can.  It’s just, we’re in the middle of this thing with the—.”

 

“Monster.  Yeah, I know.  It’s okay,” she says then, voice firmer as she swipes at her eyes.  “I can handle it.  You have to get this thing.  That’s more important.  And like you said, Chuck’s been through this before and survived it.  He’ll be fine.”

 

Dean can see that she’s talking herself into it, but he doesn’t have the time now to do anything but squeeze her shoulder and repeat his promise to drop by as soon as he can.

 

When that’s going to be, he has no idea, but right now, he can’t worry about the ex-prophet.  He has to focus on the more immediate—and deadly—problem.

 

Tara’s still drying her hands from the post-op scrub when she emerges from the surgical wing.

 

“Hey,” she says, surprised.

 

“Hey,” he answers, brushing a kiss across her temple.  It’s a first for them, and he can’t explain why he did it now, but she accepts it, eyes warming a little.  Somehow, they’d turned a corner without Dean even knowing they were headed for it.

 

“Have you had a chance to examine Meredith Evans’ body yet?”

 

Tara shakes her head.  “It’s been busy.  There was a tractor accident this morning at the Peebow farm.”

 

“Darian okay?”

 

Tara nods.  “I think so.”

 

“So nothing I have to worry about?”

 

Tara smiles.  “No, he’ll make it without your mojo.”

 

“Good.  Look, do you think you could take a look at Meredith’s body now?”

 

Tara’s eyes grow skeptical.  “I don’t know.  I’d have to check my schedule…”

 

“Not a full autopsy, just one thing in particular.”

 

“What?”  Now she’s speculating; he can see it in the way her eyes track away from his face and lose focus.

 

“I need to know if she was on the…uh, menstruating.”

 

She hadn’t expected that.  “What?”

 

“Something Brenda said.  She was in the bathroom just before she was attacked.  She was…uh…you know.”  He makes a hand gesture, which Tara pretends not to understand, only relenting when Dean feels his face heating up.

 

“Yes, I can check on that.  You want to wait or should I call you with the result?”

 

“I’ll wait.”

 

Tara emerges from the morgue a few minutes later with a grim, triumphant look.  “She was.  Does that help?”

 

“I think so.  Maybe.  I have to check on a couple of things.  I’ll let you know.  Thanks, Tara.”

 

As he’s turning away, she stops him with a hand on his arm.  “Don’t bullshit me, Dean.  Call me when you have something.”

 

Looking at her determined face, hearing the same tone in her voice, Dean sees the girl Jax fell in love with.  She’s beautiful and fierce, smart and focused.  It’s a hell of a turn-on.

 

“I will,” he says.  “I’ll call when I’ve figured it out.”

 

He’s maybe as surprised as she is to hear the promise in his voice.

 

In truth, Dean’s about out of resources.  He’s got a whole pile of maybes and not a single definite to stave off the uncertainty, but that’s never stopped him before.

 

Besides, it was his dad and his brother who were sticklers for facts.  Dean was always better at flying by the seat of his pants.

 

Still, he rouses Edda once more from her retired life, spends some time in the library looking over the rest of Charming’s scant collection of Indian lore, and finds confirmation in two other stories, though neither of them originates in tribes on this coast.  Still, he’ll take what he can get.

 

After thanking Edda, Dean heads for the Clubhouse, where he greets Bobby and J.C. tersely and holes up in the Chapel, Dad’s book opened to a case he’d worked in ’05.  While Dean and Sam were fruitlessly searching for their father and following his cryptic coordinates, he’d been helping out an old Marine buddy in the mountains of Tennessee, tracking a native monster that could only be destroyed by menstruating women.

 

It’s not the same thing as a monster that eats them, but it confirms Dean’s working theory that the blood is the catalyst for the creature’s attack.

 

Done at the library, he drives to the co-operative farm that Grady manages and runs his theory by Grady.

  
“Ay-yep,” Grady says when Dean finishes his explanation.  “I ran across something like that once myself.  Not a Bigfoot, though.  A ghoul.  Only attacked women, only certain times of the month.  Was hunting at a girls’ boarding school in Nebraska.”

 

Dean shuts off the mental images that brings and says, “So how did you kill it?”

 

Grady shrugs.  “The usual.”

 

Decapitation and burning the remains. 

 

“That works for a lot of things,” Dean observes, trying not to consider how hard it’s going to be to decapitate a super-strong giant in a berserker blood rage.

 

“Let’s hope it works on this fucker, too,” Grady answers.  “You need help?”

 

Dean can see by the old hunter’s eyes that he wants in, that he’s eager to get in on the hunt but doesn’t want to step on Dean’s toes.  Hunters are, by nature, a territorial lot, prone to paranoia and jealousy. 

 

But Dean’s had a lot of years to be more than a hunter, so it takes nothing for him to say, “Hell, yeah.”  His ego isn’t really an issue when women’s lives are at stake.

 

“We gotta find the bait for the trap,” Grady says then, giving Dean a heavy look.

  
He’d already thought of that.  “I’ll set it up, let you know.”

 

Keeping his promise, Dean calls Tara from the Clubhouse landline, fills her in on what he thinks he knows.

 

When he finishes explaining, there’s a considerable pause on the other end of the line, and Dean is about to ask if she’s still there when she says, “I’ll be the bait.”

 

“What?”

 

“If you can set it up for the next day or two, I’ll be the bait.  I fit the victim profile.”

 

It takes an embarrassing silence of seconds for Dean to catch on to what she’s telling him.

 

“Oh.  Uh…”  He hesitates, already hearing what Jax is going to say to that idea.

 

“I’m doing it, Dean.  I’m at risk anyway.  Might as well make it worth something.”

 

It’s a good point. 

 

He just doubts Jax will see it that way.

 

Closing his eyes against a sudden wave of exhaustion, Dean nods and then realizes she can’t see him.  “Yeah, okay.  Good.  Thanks.  I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.  We’ll have to figure a good place to set it up.”

 

“My house should work.”

 

“You don’t want this thing in your—.”

 

“I want this thing.”  There’s steel in her voice, and Dean realizes it’s futile to argue.  Sees once more what Jax loved…loves…about Tara.

 

“Okay.  I’ll need the keys.”

 

Her snort is audible over the landline.

 

“Yeah, alright.  I can pick the lock.  Just figured you’d rather give me a key.”

 

“Be here in fifteen?”

 

“Yeah.” 

 

But as he’s heading toward the Clubhouse door, it opens, Jax strolling through it, smile of surprised joy at seeing Dean rapidly faltering as he takes in Dean’s expression.

 

Dean’s going to be late.

 

*****

 

**Report Thirty-one (Unedited)**

**First Charming Expeditionary Force**

**C’oeur d’Alene, ID**

**4 February 2012**

**Grace Cho, Lieutenant, Charming’s Army**

After what happened to Stacey, no one wants to go on.  It takes Ope reminding us of our duty, of why we took this mission to begin with, to agree that we’ll stick to the original route.  For Stacey, as Chibs points out when we climb into the Escalade.

 

I watch Stacey’s grave get smaller and smaller as we drive away.

 

Goddamned motherfucking Scavengers.  We’d killed every last one of them, of course, but it didn’t make me feel better.  Doesn’t.

 

Anyway, I’m glad to see the last of Idaho, don’t care if I ever go back there.

 

Montana’s got to be better, right?

 

*****

 

**Billings** **, MT** ****

**6 February 2012**

 

I hate dogs.  So of course, Billings is crawling with them.  We’d spotted packs of feral dogs before, big packs, too, thirty or forty animals in a pack, running down a deer or pacing us along the road, bold in the way lone dogs never are, wolf-like in their groupthink.

 

Weird fucking dogs.

 

But Billings.

 

Let me tell you something about Billings: Don’t go there.

 

Let me start at the beginning.  We stopped a half-mile out, like we always do before we enter a town or city.  Stop to scope the surroundings and make a plan for entering and exiting.  Cities like Billings have a lot of potential for bad shit.

 

Opie tells us to memorize the map, keep alternate routes in mind, stay off the radios unless we absolutely have to use them.  Keep the channels open for emergencies.

 

It’s good advice.  He knows what he’s talking about.

 

So we make a plan. I’m riding second beside Chibs, locked and loaded, watching everywhere when the lead gunboat halts suddenly and Chibs says, “What the feck?”

 

Dogs.

 

Hundreds of them, boiling around the tires, biting at the running boards.  The noise is like something from hell, constant and awful.  They leap onto the hood of the Escalade, snap at the windshield like they’re going to eat their way through.

  
I’ve got my window open just a crack, and I can smell the stench of the city now, the dog shit stink hanging in the air like a cloud.

  
“Jaysus,” Chibs says and motions me to roll up the window.

 

Yeah.  I have to second him on that reaction.  Ahead of us, the gunboat starts to roll, and we follow.  I watch Juice and Beef behind us, can see the tanker behind them wading through the dogs.  I see a yellow one go right under the truck’s big wheels, dog and then paste, like that.

 

Chibs winces and curses as bodies thud against the doors and under our tires.  They aren’t backing away, aren’t the least afraid of us.

 

I look for red eyes and foaming mouths, but they don’t seem to be rabid, just vicious and feral.  And many.  Billings is their city and we’re trespassing.  They’re just marking their territory.

 

It takes us an hour and a half to bull our way through, rolling slowly, looking for any signs of life besides the canine kind, but I think we all knew it was pointless.  No way anyone lives here.

 

“This town’s gone to the dogs,” Chibs says.  I smack him without taking my eyes off the road ahead of us, willing us to get through it and get gone. 

 

I hate dogs.

 

*****

 

 _We do what we have to, make other plans, stick as close to the map as we’re able.  It doesn’t matter.  Life and the road have other ideas, and we’re just the bitches who follow._ (Letters 36-22-24)

 

“No.  No way.”

 

“She’s already said yes,” Dean answers.

  
“You fucking son of a bitch,” Jax responds, coming up out of his chair, shoving into Dean’s space.  “What gives you the right?”

 

The others had had the sense to clear out of the Clubhouse as soon as he’d said, “You what?!” when Dean told him about Tara.  Bobby and J.C. had mumbled something about groceries, Zeke about tuning up his bike.

 

Jax figures the fewer witnesses to this, the better.  It’s liable to come to blows—of one kind or another.

 

“Tara’s a big girl, Jax.  She knows what she’s signing on for.”  Dean’s using his careful voice, the one that treads the line between placating and patronizing.  Jax hates that tone. 

 

“No.  I won’t let it happen.  It’s not happening.” Even as he commands it, he knows it’s a losing battle.  Tara’s stubborn streak is only beaten out by Dean’s, and neither of them is going to let Jax have his way on this one.  There are too many innocent lives at risk. 

 

“What makes you think you can stop her?”  Dean’s voice has a little heat in it now, which Jax counts as an improvement over the earlier tone.

 

Jax levels a poisonous look at Dean, and Dean takes a hesitant half-step back.

 

 

“I can stop you,” Jax says.  There’s a promise there, a challenge. 

 

Dean forces a cocky smile, a casual shrug.  “You can try.”

 

Jax wants to slug that smile off of his husband’s face, and his fists clench as he fights the urge. 

 

“I know you love her,” Dean says then, a statement of fact, no jealousy, no hurt.  Dean’s understanding makes Jax’s guts ache.

 

“I love _you_ ,” Jax says.

  
Another shrug, this one more studied.  “You love us both.”

 

“It’s not the same,” Jax insists.

 

“I know that. I’m not asking you to choose, Jax.  Tara wants to do this.  She’s seen what this monster can do.  She’s in.”

 

“She’s one of our only doctors,” Jax offers, a valid argument, but he knows he’s losing ground.

 

Dean nods, “That’s true.  So I should ask Rita, then, because she’s only an old lady?”

 

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” Jax snaps, fists closing again.

 

Dean nods, says nothing, waits.

 

“We’ll back you up,” Jax says, and before he’s even finished with it, Dean’s shaking his head. 

 

“No.  The fewer people in on this, the better.  Monster like this one is—smart, fast—won’t come near Tara if it senses people around her house. 

 

Jax can tell there are reasons Dean is leaving unsaid, reasons having to do with their inexperience in dealing with monsters, their usual approach to violent situations.

  
He resents it fiercely for a moment, hands clenching again, and then slumps, feeling old and tired.  He hates this job sometimes.  He wants to hit something until it bleeds or until he does.

 

“Keep her safe,” he says, not asking.  He knows better than to expect Dean to promise what he can’t necessarily deliver.

 

“I know what I’m doing,” Dean answers instead.

 

It’s Jax’s turn to nod and say nothing. 

 

Dean steps closer to Jax, wraps his hands around Jax’s wrists above his still-clenched fists, squeezes.  Jax feels the strength of Dean’s touch through every part of him, sucks in a deep breath, raises his head to stare into Dean’s unwavering gaze.

 

“When?” Jax asks.

 

But Dean doesn’t answer, just leans closer, slides his lips across Jax’s, startling a sound out of him, maybe protest—now’s not the time or place—maybe want.  He always wants Dean, any way he can have him, as often as he can.

 

Jax wonders, not for the first time, if there’s something broken inside of him, the way Dean can make him weak with need, drive every thought out of his head except what it feels like to have Dean inside of him or riding him, down his throat or up his ass. 

 

“Dean,” Jax breathes, trying to bring them back to the more important issue at hand.

 

Since Dean’s hand is clouding the issue by rubbing Jax’s half-hard cock through his fly, he can’t really focus on the other issue at hand, though.

 

“Apartment,” Dean growls, pooling liquid fire low in Jax’s belly.

 

He does as he’s told, compliant, already feeling the weight of Dean’s cock against his palm. When Dean closes the apartment door behind him, Jax pins him to it, grinding his cock against Dean’s, zipper biting through his boxers, Dean’s eyes tightening at the pain, too, and Jax says, “Take off your fucking clothes,” and steps away abruptly, rewarded by the way Dean sways in place for a moment before getting to the work of stripping.

They haven’t got a lot of time, and Jax doesn’t waste it getting naked, stripping hastily, leaving things where he drops them, shoving Dean hard toward the bed when he bends over to pull off his sock, leaving him sprawled and surprised, eyes wide and a little suspicious.

  
Jax can feel a wolf’s grin, all teeth and intent, splitting his face, and he runs his tongue slow and wicked over his lips, runs his eyes, just as wickedly, over Dean’s naked body, from his sock-clad foot to his inner thigh to the cock rising from its thatch of sandy hair.  He numbers the freckles on Dean’s forearm, caresses his tight nipples with a hungry look, pauses over Dean’s lips to imagine his cock stretching that mouth wide around him.

 

Suiting thought to action, Jax crosses to the left of the bed, climbs up with one knee, swings his other over Dean’s head, settles there, stradding Dean’s face, cock bobbing against Dean’s cheek as he lowers himself toward Dean’s mouth.

 

Dean’s hands are trapped behind Jax’s knees, so he can’t do anything but wait for Jax to drag his heavy cock into his mouth.  Jax draws it out, leaving snail-trails on Dean’s cheeks and chin while Dean is busy, meanwhile, exploring Jax’s back, sneaking a finger into his crack, teasing Jax’s hole.

 

Jax gasps and then slides that last precious inch to push between Dean’s lips, pausing only for a moment to let Dean know what’s coming next before he thrusts in, feeling Dean’s throat contract around the head of his cock, feeling the molten heat of it, the tightness, the way Dean struggles to relax and take him in without gagging.

 

He tries not to push, making shallow dips, pulling back, feeling Dean’s teeth grazing carefully along his cock even as Dean slides a dry finger inside of him.  It stings, bringing him back to himself momentarily, until Dean pushes ahead, crooks the finger, reaches, and then it’s all Jax can do not to choke Dean for real as Dean teases that spot inside of him.

 

With what’s left of his self-control, Jax pulls away from Dean’s mouth, wet cock dragging over Dean’s lips as he raises himself before working backwards down Dean’s body, Dean’s hands free at last to roam across Jax’s chest and then pull him down by the shoulders and ease his way to stretching out along Dean’s body.

  
Beneath him, Dean’s solidity and his strength, his chest heaving to draw breath with Jax’s weight crushing him into the mattresses, the bursts of hot air against his cheek, the wetness of Dean’s lips against his ear, drive the last thoughts from Jax, and then he’s sliding his cock against Dean’s damp belly, and Dean is groaning into his ear, saying, “Fuck, Jax, god, fuck me, fuck…,” a litany of obscenity, worshipful and rough.

 

Jax finds the oil they keep in the nightstand next to the bed, runs his hand over his length, move his wet fingers to Dean’s hole, only to discover Dean’s fingers already there, doing the readying, and then Jax is inside him, Dean stuttering under him, breaking his name with every tilt of Jax’s hips until Jax is slapping against Dean’s ass, and Dean is grunting and coming, sticky and wet, and Jax is coming too, Dean pulsing around him, pulling from him every last ounce of energy.

 

He collapses, incoherent, maybe loses a minute or two to post-orgasm unconsciousness, and when he comes to, Dean is pushing at his dead weight, saying, “Lay off the burgers, would you?”

 

It’s an old joke, and Jax gives it the chuff of a laugh it deserves, nevertheless obliging Dean’s breathing by letting him do it unimpeded.

They lay there side by side, sweaty skin touching at shoulders, wrists, hips, and ankles, and Jax has trouble remembering what it is that’s so wrong, why they came in here, what made them so desperate for this in the middle of the day.

 

Then he remembers.

 

_Fuck._

“I trust you,” he says, apparently out of the blue, but Dean’s answering, “I know,” is full of other things than those simple words.

 

They’ve done all the talking they’re going to.  Time to get to work.

 

*****

 

 _Loneliness is a state of mind completely unrelated to the people you share the world with.  In the middle of nowhere, with fuck-all but my crew and a hundred miles of nothing, I’m not alone or lonely, and that’s mostly because these are my brothers, and that’s all I need._ (Letters 41:19-20)

 

Dean is on his way out of the Clubhouse at last, having called Tara to let her know he hadn’t forgotten her entirely.

 

There’s an odd note in her voice as if she knows exactly what delayed Dean, and that might be awkward as hell, but he’s feeling pretty fucked out and mellow, so he lets it go.

 

She’s waiting at the ER entrance with a spare key and a word of warning.  “You go through my underwear drawer, I’ll rip your balls off.”

 

With all the threats to his manhood lately, Dean’s starting to develop a complex.

  
“Yes, ma’am,” he says, giving her a dirty smile and a three-fingered salute, like a perverted Boy Scout.

 

She grins and waves him off, and then he’s moving again toward Tara’s house, until the squawk of the walkie on the seat beside him has him slowing down.

  
“Yeah, Bobby,” he says, never having liked the stupid lingo of the things and not planning to start using it now.

  
“You need to get over to Chuck and Wendy’s.  There’s something going on.  Hale called me about a minute ago.  He’s got a deputy over there.”

 

“Goddamnit!” he says to himself.  Into the walkie he only says, “Roger that. Out.”  Well, sometimes the lingo is useful.

 

“Goddamnit!” he says again, louder, when he turns onto Chuck’s block and sees one of the Sheriff’s department patrol cars parked half in the driveway, half in the street, deputy on one knee behind the cover of his open door, eyes on the house.

 

He parks a few houses away and walks up, careful to keep to cover as he approaches, unsure of what he’s going to find when he gets there.

  
The deputy shoots a look over her shoulder, says, “Stay back, he’s got a gun,” and returns her full attention to the house.

  
There’s a light on in the living room, the window backlit, and Dean can see the spidering of the glass where something has struck it.

  
“He shoot at you?”

 

The deputy shakes her head.  “No, it was that way when I got here.”

 

“Wendy in there with him?”

 

“Don’t know.  Neighbors just reported shots fired and screaming.” 

 

“Chuck!” Dean calls, risking a glance around the tree he’s using for cover.  “Chuck!” he shouts again, louder still.

 

“Dean?” The ex-prophet sounds like he’s been strangled, his voice weak and warbling.  “That you?”

 

“’course it’s me.  Who else would it be?”

 

“You alone?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“She going to shoot at me if I come to the door?”

 

Dean exchanges a look with the deputy before answering.  “Not if you keep your hands where we can see them.”

 

Seconds later, the front door opens, and Chuck appears behind the screen door, hands up.

 

“I’m going to unhook the lock,” he says, lowering his hand to suit action to words.  “Okay.  You can come in.  But no funny business.”

 

Dean thinks that’s pretty hysterical, given the circumstances, but he keeps the observation to himself. 

 

“I don’t know if you should go in there,” the deputy cautions.  
  
Dean shrugs.  “He won’t shoot me.”

 

“He’s drunk.”

 

He guesses she can tell by the way his words are a slurry of syllables.  He’s heard dogs with better enunciation.

 

“He won’t shoot me,” Dean repeats, only this time, he’s trying to convince himself, too.

 

As he approaches the door, Chuck steps back into the shadows.

 

“Hey, buddy,” Dean cajoles.  “How about showing me your hands again?”

 

Chuck steps back into the light, hands up and empty, hurt expression on his face.  “I wouldn’t shoot you, Dean.  You’re my friend.”

 

As Dean opens the screen door and steps inside, Chuck stumbles into the wall opposite the door, and Dean reaches out automatically to keep the smaller man from falling.

 

Chuck sags into Dean’s arms, head against Dean’s chest, shoulders heaving.

 

“Hey.  Hey,” Dean says, patting Chuck awkwardly on the back.  “It’s okay.”

 

“It’s not,” comes Chuck’s muffled response.  He’s got one hand fisted in Dean’s flannel under his jacket, the other clinging to Dean’s back. 

Dean’s just starting to wonder if he’s entirely misread Chuck’s friendship all these years when the ex-prophet shakes himself a little, steps back and away, and raises bloodshot eyes to Dean’s.

 

“Sorry,” he says, voice wrecked.  He clears his throat and tries again.  “I’m sorry.”

 

“No problem.”  Dean brushes it off and gestures to the kitchen.  “Why don’t we go sit down, see if you can’t tell me what’s going on here.”

 

Chuck looks around a little wildly, like he’s found himself in a strange place and has no recollection of how he got there.  Then he nods, shoulders slumping, and slouches toward the kitchen, where he sinks into a chair at the table.

 

Dean takes in the room at a glance—broken whiskey bottles, fridge door open, caught on a broken jar of peaches, congealed orange fruit pooling on the floor.  He clears the mess with his boot and wedges the fridge closed; no sense wasting energy.

 

“You’ve got more important things to do,” Chuck observes, and Dean nods. 

 

“That’s true.  So why don’t you tell me what the hell is going on, Chuck?  Why’d I get a call from Bobby that something was going down over here? Why’s there a deputy sheriff outside with her gun drawn?”

 

“I screwed up,” Chuck whispers after a minute.  Dean can hear fresh tears in his voice.  “I screwed up and she left me.”

 

“Wendy?”

 

Chuck nods, neck like a broken spring.  “We had a fight about—.”  He waves his hands around the kitchen.

  
“Your drinking?”

 

Another spasmodic nod.  “And the visions, and the Expedition, and…and…you.”

 

“You fought about me?”

 

Chuck’s head bobs miserably and he groans, propping his elbows on the table and resting his head in his upraised hands.

 

“She thinks you’re a bad influence.  That I—I—I’m stuck in the past, or something.  That I have to stop thinking that I can be useful to you and—and move on.”

 

Dean mulls that for a little while.  Wendy is probably right, or she would be if it weren’t for one thing.

 

“You still having the visions?”

 

Chuck’s broken nod grows frantic and he chokes back a dry sob.

 

“Hey, take it easy.”  Dean’s tempted to find the guy a bottle just to calm him down, but that seems ultimately counterproductive.

 

“Still can’t tell me what’s in them?”

 

A shake, equally violent, shifting the table a little under his elbows as he shudders.

 

“She’s right, you know?  I’m no use to you, not if I can’t tell you what I’m seeing.  Maybe I _am_ crazy.  Before, my visions always meant something, even when they didn’t make much sense, and I could always talk them out.  These, though…why would I get them if I can’t share them?  What’s the point except to drive me insane?”

 

Dean has to concede that Chuck’s logic seems sound, despite the fact that the guy himself is totally fubared.

 

“Okay, look,” Dean begins, reaching for the right thing to say.  Give him a sucking chest wound, he can stick his hands into it, maybe heal it.  Emotional shit, though?  Not his forte. “Look, maybe the visions are a part of your gift, or a new kind of gift.  Maybe you just have to ride them out for a little while longer, see what happens.  But in the meantime, man, you’ve got to lay off the booze.  You look like shit, your breath stinks, and you’re slurring your words.  You’re like the crazy guy at the bus stop.”

 

There is, of course, no bus stop still active in Charming.  Nor is there a bus, for that matter.  But the analogy makes Chuck laugh, a pathetic, desperate breath of a laugh, but Dean will take what he can get.

  
“Yeah, I guess I’m pretty fucked up.”

 

“So what’s with the gunplay?”

 

“What?”  Chuck looks genuinely mystified for all of three seconds and then the truth comes down on him like a curtain of woe.  “Oh, shit,” he breathes, eyes going wide.  “Is that why the cop is out there?  Oh, god, did I hurt anyone?  I didn’t hurt anyone, did I?”

 

“I don’t think so.  Wendy was already gone, right?”  Dean holds his breath on the question until Chuck’s, “Yeah,” sets his mind at ease on that point.  “So no, I don’t think you hurt anyone.  What were you shooting at?”

 

Chuck stills in his seat, head coming up slowly to look at Dean, who is a little slow on the uptake.  He’s waiting, growing impatient and hoping the deputy doesn’t lose hers and come storming in, when he suddenly gets it.

 

“Oh, man,” he says, shaking his head.  “You were trying to kill yourself?  Jesus, Chuck!”

 

“I know, I know,” he says miserably, once again talking to the tabletop.  “I was just so…desperate, I guess.  Wendy was gone, and I couldn’t get these fucking visions out of my head.”  He pounds the heel of his hand against his forehead with increasing violence until Dean reaches across the table and grabs his wrist.

  
“Stop that.”  Mind racing, feeling time ticking away on him, Dean tries to think how he can put a temporary fix on this.  Finally, he says, “Look, can you do something for me?”

 

Chuck looks up, eyes red but something in them hopeful, the tiniest flicker of it, barely breaking through the pall of uncertainty and anguish on his pale face.  “What?”

 

“Take a shower.  Clean up the kitchen.  Have something to eat.  I’ll send someone over to make sure you stay sober and alive until tomorrow, when I can come back and try to figure things out.  I can’t stay now.  I have to go.  There’s this—.”

 

“Monster.  I know.”

 

“You saw it?”  Dean’s excitement is immediately deflated by Chuck’s dejected expression.

 

“I heard about it from Wendy, who heard from this intern at the hospital, Enzo.”  By the way he emphasizes the intern’s name, Dean can tell Chuck is jealous of the guy.

  
“Hey, listen, don’t sweat this thing with Wendy.  Women are…”  He doesn’t know how to finish that sentence, his longest relationship with a woman having lasted less time than a lunar cycle.  And Jax is hardly a woman.  Not even a little. 

 

“Well, anyway, I’m sure she’ll come to her senses.  And you can be ready for her when she does by cleaning yourself and this place up.  I’m going to go tell the deputy that she can leave, okay?  And when I get back in here, I want to see every bottle you’ve got lined up on that counter.  You hear me?”

 

Chuck nods convulsively and stands up, taking a few unsteady steps before squaring his shoulders and moving with greater purpose toward the bedrooms upstairs.

 

“Everything alright?” the deputy asks, not coming out of her crouch until Dean says, “Yeah, he was just distraught.  Probably not the best time to be cleaning his gun.”  The gun Dean had stowed in the back of pants, as a matter of fact. 

 

“I’m going to have to write this up.”

 

“I know.  But do you think you could come back and talk to him tomorrow?  I’m going to get one of the Sons to come over and sit with him tonight, make sure he’s okay.  I think it’s all a big misunderstanding.”

 

She looks dubious, but she holsters her gun and gets in her car anyway.  “Hey, Mr. Winchester?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Make sure you get the gun.”

 

He smiles, wide and charming, and she gives it back to him.  “No problem.”

 

Then she’s gone, radio squawking as she hits the street.  He worries what the call is about, but when she doesn’t disappear in a mess of lights and sirens, he figures it wasn’t anything big.

 

Back inside, there are four bottles of brown liquor on the counter, two bottles of wine, and a squat clay jug of something Dean doesn’t care to identify.

  
“This it?” he asks sternly, eyeing Chuck hard.

 

“Ye—yes.  This is it.”

 

“Okay.  Go take a shower.  I’ll call Zeke and wait for him to get here before I leave.”

“Are you going to the hospital?” he asks hopefully.

 

Dean nods.  “No.  But if I happen to see Wendy, I’ll talk to her for you,” he adds, anticipating Chuck’s next question.  Jesus, when did he become the post-apocalypse Doctor Laura?

 

“G-good.  And thanks, Dean.  Thanks.”  Chuck comes in for a hug, this one considerably less ambiguous—back-slap one-armed guy hugs are more like it.

  
Then Chuck is shuffling toward the upstairs bathroom and Dean’s on the phone in the kitchen tracking down Zeke, who shows up ten minutes later with a brown bag of sandwiches, a thermos of coffee, and several hours’ worth of DVDs.

 

“We’ll have a party,” Zeke says, smiling shyly at Dean.  Zeke’s a little strange, but he seems okay, and besides, Chuck’s a lot strange, so maybe they’ll really hit it off.

  
“Don’t let him near any sharp objects, don’t let him hang himself, make sure you keep him away from your gun.”

 

“Got it, boss,” Zeke says.  Dean cuts him a look at the title but lets it stand.  Got to be some benefits to boning the King of the World.  Automatic obedience seems like a good one.

 

“I’m taking the alcohol and his gun.  Try to keep him from drinking, too.”  Dean hadn’t entirely believed Chuck’s profession that this was all the alcohol in the house.

 

He loads it into a box he finds under the sink and puts it in the trunk of the Impala.

 

On the way to Tara’s house, Dean considers what he can say to Wendy to get her back.  Chuck needs someone, and Dean isn’t available.  The guy might be losing his marbles, but he had played an important role in preventing the End.  He deserves more than the torment he seems to be getting.

  
Dean wonders for the thousandth time what God must be thinking, running shit the way He does, and then for the thousandth time plus one, he lets it go.  Not his place.  And besides, he probably doesn’t want to know.

 

Tara lives in the house she grew up in, a California ranch with faded aqua blue shutters and a matching blue door with two windows in it, elaborate scrollwork guard over the exterior screen door.  The light’s on in her living room when he walks up from where he’d left the Impala around the corner.  No sense tipping the monster to his presence.

 

Somewhere out beyond the back fence-line of her property, Grady is waiting and watching, their back-up plan if something goes wrong in the house.

 

The sun is almost down, the sky above the horizon a washed out gold fading to dirty blue.  She answers the door after a second series of knocks, the time in between making him nervous, visions of her eviscerated body looping through his head, and he breathes out and smiles with relief when she opens the door.

 

“Hey,” she says.  “You’re late.”

 

“Emergency.” 

She raises an eloquent eyebrow.

  
“ _Another_ one,” he adds, not bothering to explain.

 

She nods like she gets it and invites him into the kitchen, pointing out the door to the cellar stairs beside the refrigerator. 

 

“You think this is going to work?” she asks.

 

Dean shrugs.  “I don’t know.  You can’t be the only woman in Charming who’s bleeding.  But your house is only two blocks from Meredith’s and three from Brenda’s.  I’m hoping it’s got a territory and that you’re in it.  That would narrow the number of potential victims, I’d think.”

 

“God, this is how you see the world, isn’t it?”

 

He looks up at her, startled at her words.  “What do you mean?”

 

“The world for you is about potential threats, exit strategies, never sitting with your back to the door.  It’s about making sure every angle is covered, every danger neutralized.”

 

Dean shrugs, feeling defensive.  There’s something accusatory about her tone.  “It’s not much different than the way you do your job,” he points out, maybe a little more sharply than he needs to.

  
“Yes, but I leave my work at the hospital.  You live yours.”

 

He shrugs again.  “What’s your point?”

 

“It’s just got to be hard, always being on guard.”

 

Dean laughs, a humorless sound, and gives her a hard look. He hates being psychoanalyzed. “What’s your _other_ point?”

 

It’s Tara’s turn to laugh, a flat sound in the suddenly cold kitchen.  “I don’t love him like that anymore, Dean, but it doesn’t mean I don’t worry about him and want what’s best for him.”

 

“And I’m not?”

 

Tara shakes her head.  “No.  No, you are, actually.  You’re exactly what he needs.  You’re…beautiful and dangerous.  Like him.  Only I think you’re probably more dangerous than he is.  He knows all about the human threats but you…you’ve got a corner on a whole other market of nasty shit, don’t you?”

 

As always, Dean’s surprised to hear curse words come out of her elegant mouth.

 

“You’d better hope so,” he answers pointedly, and she smiles, a wide, shark-like smile that says, _Touché_ , as clearly as if she’d spoken it.

 

“For what it’s worth, I know what he sees in you, too,” Dean says then, surprising himself and her.

 

“The past,” Tara says, a little sadly, but there’s no bitterness in her voice, and Dean thinks she meant it when she said she doesn’t love Jax like that anymore.

“No, that’s not true.  He still loves you.  Hard not to, you being who you are.”

 

She nods and looks away, blushing in acknowledgement.  “Thank you,” she says at last.

  
“We done bitching at each other?” Dean asks.  “Can we make you bait for a vicious killer monster now?”

 

Tara laughs, a ringing sound that fills the room, dispelling the last of the chill.

 

Hours later, butt asleep, calves cramped as he crouches between the couch and the wall in Tara’s immaculate living room, Dean’s thinking he could use a cup of coffee, a stiff drink, and a blowjob, maybe not in that order, when a sound from under his feet drives all thought of other things right out of his head.

 

Tara rises from her seat in a reading chair across from the couch and takes a hesitant step toward the kitchen.

  
He raises himself far enough to catch her eye and shakes his head in the negative.  She nods, a tight little motion, and goes back to her seat, sitting there even as the unmistakable sound of heavy footsteps on the basement stairs fills the spaces between heartbeats.

 

Tara’s sitting on the far side of the living room, not too far from the long hallway that leads to the back bedrooms.

 

The kitchen is to Dean’s left.  Ideally, the monster will come into the room and Dean will be able to get it from behind.

  
He’s got his gun in one hand and his vampire-hunting machete in the other, wooden grip warm and familiar in his hand.

 

Despite—or maybe because of, he doesn’t have the time or inclination to think about it—Tara’s danger, Dean’s blood is singing, his heart kicking up beneath his ribs.  His muscles feel warm and loose, his eyes sharper, head clearer than usual. 

 

The cellar door swings open with a creak, bouncing a little against the wall as the creature pushes it open and tromps into the kitchen.  Through his feet, Dean can feel its weight on the floor, knows it must be big, sees the very moment Tara catches sight of it by the way her eyes widen with terror.

 

It passes the doorway and then pauses, and Dean gets his first sight of it as it looms four feet away from him.  Big—fucking big—maybe eight feet from toes to the top of its head.  Covered from head to toe with mangy white hair, blood and darker things matted in it, its own stench heavy on the air even while it sniffs audibly for sign.  With the juicy bait right there, in its direct line of sight, the creature can only sense that something is out of place.

 

Dean stays absolutely still, waiting, blood roaring in his ears, lungs singing against the agony of held breath.

 

Then it’s across the room in three long strides, Tara climbing over the armrest to get away, back-pedaling, gasping, fear and self-preservation warring to see which will control her.

 

Dean lunges out of his crouch, stalks up behind the monster, raises the machete.  It must hear the sound of the blade cutting air, because it turns, sweeping its long arm outward in a killing arc, and Dean ducks the blow, feels the power of it ruffle the hair above his ear, throws himself backwards, losing the machete in an effort to break the fall, roll, come up facing it.

  
Last thing he wants is this thing at his back.

 

But when he’s up, it’s not coming for him, having turned its attention back to Tara, who’s got her back against the wall two feet from the hallway’s promise of escape.  Dean’s willing her to break and run, trying to signal her to get out of the line of fire.  If he shoots it now, the bullet could hit Tara.  The machete is nowhere to be seen, can only have slid under the couch, and this is so not the time to be on his hands and knees searching for it.

 

He crouches, feels around under the skirt of the sofa, eyes on the monster and its prey, wondering what’s making it hesitate.  If it had been going to run from the trap, it would already have gone.

 

No, it’s sticking around.

 

Then Dean hears it sniffing again, great gusty inhales loud even over the blood in his ears and Tara’s gasping breaths.

 

Damn.

 

It takes a step toward Tara, raising its hand, claws out, as if it wants to touch her.

  
Tara whimpers, eyes fixed on the claws, caked with offal from the monster’s last victim.

 

The sound seems to awaken its baser urges, and it hesitates no longer.  Even as Dean’s fingers finally brush something solid under the couch, the creature lurches toward Tara with both hands extended now, intentions clear.

 

Before he can clear the couch skirts with his weapon, the thing has taken Tara to the floor beneath it, and she’s screaming, one long, continuous shriek of terror that somehow pitches higher as the monster starts to move on top of her.

 

Dean moves up behind it, grabs it by the hair, pulls its head back, but it’s strong, and with a bellow of rage, it backhands him away.  He staggers, flails, goes down over the arm of the reading chair, twists and lands on hands and knees, and when he gets back up, there’s blood.

  
A spray of it on the wall over the place where Tara and the monster are struggling.  Her screams have turned to grunts and moans, and Dean’s struck by a wave of despair.

  
He’s heard enough people die to know what it sounds like, and in the moment he recognizes his failure, he realizes this will ruin him and Jax. 

 

With cold deliberation, Dean shoves his gun in the back of his pants and grabs the machete handle with both hands.  He’s going to kill this fucker if it’s the last thing he does.  Maybe it would be a mercy for them both if it is.

 

He’s almost upon the thing, so lost in its work over Tara’s body that it seems to have forgotten Dean’s presence, when the monster heaves, throws its head back as if startled, and Dean has a split second to register Tara, bloodied but grinning viciously, one fist clenched low down on its body between its spread legs, before he takes the advantage and swings the blade.

 

The monster’s head hits the ground with a dull thud, bounces, rolls in a wobbling arc, and comes to rest at Tara’s feet even as the body starts to slump toward her, drenching her in a slowing pulse of arterial blood.

  
Dean catches the creature, shoves it aside, and Tara scrambles out from under it.

 

There’s so much gore, he can’t tell what injuries she’s sustained, and he drops the machete, reaching out for her in case she falters.

 

She staggers a step, slips in blood, sways like she’ll fall, and then moves again, confidently this time, toward the front door, which she throws open so hard that it strikes the wall behind it.

 

Then she’s through the screen door onto the porch, down the walk, and out onto the front lawn, where she stops to stare straight up at the sky, at this time of night an indigo velvet just coming over with rhinestone stars.

 

“Tara?” he asks, approaching her carefully, afraid she’s in shock or a fugue state or has had some sort of psychotic break.

 

But she turns her head to take him in, where he stands just behind and to one side of her, and she says, calm as can be, “So you did this for a living, huh?”

 

“Yeah,” he answers cautiously, unsure what’s coming next.

  
“You’re fucking insane.”

 

He laughs, a short, sharp bark that echoes in the still, dark neighborhood.

 

“Everyone okay?” Grady calls, appearing from around the garage.

  
“Yeah, we’re good,” Dean answers.  “Monster’s dead.”

 

Grady moves into the house, presumably to see for himself.

 

Just then, the quiet is disturbed by the sound of a motorcycle moving fast through the evening streets.

 

They stand there without exchanging a look or a word until Jax roars up, skidding into the driveway, bike barely off and still swaying on its stand when Jax is in front of Tara, gripping her shoulders with both hands and saying, “Are you alright?  Tara?”

 

Tara smiles, at first just a weak little glimmer of teeth in the growing moonlight as it rises over the trees, and then a wicked and wild thing and then a long laugh, a little hysterical but mostly okay.

 

Jax gives Dean a flummoxed look, and Dean shrugs.  “We got it,” Dean explains.  “Tara was great.”

 

The King of the World nods uncertainly, holding the laughing woman at arm’s length like she might lose her mind all over him.

 

“Tara?” Jax asks again, and her laughter increases in strength, but she manages to sputter a few words in between bouts.

  
Those words are:  “Dean is fucking insane.”

 

Dean thinks that’s the pot calling the kettle black at this point, but he laughs like it’s funny and says, “Let’s go inside.”

 

“Just a sec,” Jax says, nodding down the street to where a Jeep is rounding the corner.  It arrives out front, and Feenie and two of his boys climb out.  They’re wearing identical blue work shirts, each with his name over the pocket and a “Deputy in Training” badge on the left shoulder.

 

“Nobody goes in or out,” Jax orders, and the boys take up convincingly official positions along the driveway and sidewalk.

 

Grady meets them at the door.  Tara has fallen silent and is looking a little pale, though it’s hard to see much of her actual skin, so soaked is she in blood.

 

Jax starts to lead her toward the kitchen, but she stops in the middle of the living room, eyes on the headless corpse that’s transformed her comfortable home into a slaughterhouse.

 

When she moves toward the body, Jax reaches out as if to stop her, but Dean gives him a look, shakes his head, and Jax lets her go.

 

Dean knows what comes next.  He’s been in this place before.

 

She walks around the body as best she can, crouches down to get a closer look at the stump of its spine where he’d taken off its head.  She stands up, walks to its feet, toes the head until it rolls face up.  It’s gruesome, vaguely humanoid, double rows of teeth exposed by its lips, which are curled back to reveal black gums, like it’s grinning at her.

 

She looks up at Dean, then, with a strange, haunted smile, something dark and triumphant in her eyes.  Dean nods once, solemnly, like he’s initiating her into a secret society, and she nods back just the same, her face acknowledging their shared experience.

 

Then she turns toward the hallway and disappears into the room at the end.  A minute later, pipes bang to life as the shower goes on.

 

“She okay?”

 

Dean shrugs.  “Might be a good idea to call Doc Maartens, have him swing by, but I think she’s good for the most part.”

 

“What happened?”

 

Dean considers the mess they have to clean up, feels the adrenaline crash creeping over him, and wishes he could just be at home in bed, already clean, with nothing to do but let Jax wrap his mouth around his cock and suck his brains out through it so he wouldn’t have to think anymore or ever again.

 

Instead, he starts to tell the story, which Grady joins them to hear, leaning in the kitchen doorway, nodding now and again and adding his part when the time comes.

 

“It came in through the neighbor’s hedge to the east, broke a window in the basement on that side.  Moved fast and quiet, didn’t hesitate.  Like it had scouted the place beforehand.”

 

“Could’ve,” Dean concedes, remembering how the creature seemed to have known it was a trap, telling Jax and Grady about the sniffing.

 

“So it just couldn’t resist the blood, then?”  Grady asks at last.

 

“Seems like.”

 

“Weird,” Grady sums up, and Jax gives a little laugh, half incredulity, half admiration.

  
“Guess it had to be if you think so,” Jax notes, and the old hunter gives him a smile.

  
“Well, I’m headed home unless you need me for something else.  I’ve got that shit run in the morning.”

 

Grady is in charge of all big farm manure disposal.

  
Jax shakes his hand, slaps him on the shoulder, says, “Thank you,” like he really means it. 

 

Grady shrugs it off, accepts Dean’s silent handshake, and sketches a wave as he goes out the back door, presumably in the direction of his truck.

 

Down the hall, the shower shuts off at the same time they hear, “Boss!” from the front yard.

 

Feenie’s standing there staring down Blue, who’s giving the kid a steady death glare.  “You said no one in or out, right?”

 

“That I did,” Jax answers, amusement evident in his tone.  “You can let him by, Feenie.”

 

The kid slumps, a little deflated by having his authority removed, and steps aside.

  
“What’s up?” Jax asks.

  
Blue’s face is serious.  “Peri Winkler just got a transmission from the Expedition.”

 

Dean feels his heart clench and stutter in his chest.

 

“Everyone okay?” Jax asks. 

 

“Yeah, they’re fine.  But they’ve got sickness in Three Rivers, want to know about sending a doctor.”

 

“I’ll go,” Tara calls through the screen door.  “But I want to talk to someone there first, see what supplies I might need.”

 

“Tara,” Jax begins, obviously intending to deter her.

 

“I’m going,” she repeats, steel in her voice.

 

Jax takes a breath to protest when Dean leans in and says, “Forget it, Jax.  She’ll be fine.”

 

Seeming to recognize the impossibility of overcoming the combined stubbornness of his ex-lover and his husband, Jax nods shortly, clearly unhappy but just as clearly outgunned.

 

“Fine.  I’ll have Feenie take you to the radio room.”

 

“No.  He and the others can clean up the mess.  Blue can drive me.”

 

Blue tips his hat, says, “Ma’am,” as though she’s his superior, and makes a sweeping gesture toward his truck parked at the curb.

 

“Let me put on something more appropriate,” she says then, which is when Dean realizes she’s only got a towel on.

 

 _Man, how the mighty have fallen_ , he thinks.  Time was, what Tara wasn’t wearing would have been the first thing he noticed.

 

“I am so gay,” he mutters.

 

Jax snorts.  “What gave it away, the fact that you suck cock like a pro or ride it like a rodeo ace?”

 

“Shut up,” Dean says fondly, gesturing Feenie over.  The kid’s been standing a respectful distance away doing his level best to eavesdrop anyway.

 

“We’ve got a job for you and the guys.  When Doctor Knowles leaves, go inside, get that thing out of her living room, take it to the dump, burn the body and the head, and then scatter the ashes.  Got it?”

 

Tara is ready within minutes, and as she joins them on her lawn, she gives Jax a quick squeeze but lingers over Dean’s hug, whispering, “Thank you,” in his ear before brushing a kiss like moth’s wings over the corner of his lip.  Then she’s swallowed up by Blue’s truck interior and they’re gone.

 

Jax and Dean return to the house to see Feenie and the other two boys standing six feet from the body, gaping at it like it might come to life and attack them.

 

“Get to it,” Dean barks, and the boys start edging toward the corpse.

 

As they watch the three figure out how to lift the thing and get it out to the Jeep, Jax says, “So this is what you called a hot Friday night back in the day?”

 

“Yeah,” and then thinks twice.  “Well, not quite.  This is better.  For one thing, we didn’t have a clean-up crew back then, had to do all the dirty work ourselves.”

 

“That the only thing that’s better about now?”

 

Dean smirks, a twist of his lips that says he knows exactly what Jax is fishing for.  “There are a few other perks,” he observes, stepping back as Feenie and the boys pass by them to retrieve the head and roll up the living room rug for disposal. 

 

“Yeah?”

 

Dean turns to Jax, wraps a hand around the back of his neck, pulls him in, and sucks his tongue into his mouth.

 

One of the three makes a choking sound, and Dean and Jax shoot him simultaneous birds without breaking the kiss. 

 

When they come up for air, they’re alone, only a stain on the hardwood and a smear on the wall to show for the night’s excitement.

 

A hesitant knock alerts them that Feenie and his boys are still lurking.

  
“What?” Jax asks, impatient to get Dean home and alone so they can celebrate their victory over the monster.

 

“Anything else you want us for, boss?” Feenie asks.

 

“Board up the window in the basement,” Dean says immediately.  “And make sure you shut out the lights and lock up.  Doctor Knowles will be back in an hour or so, so make it snappy.”

 

“Yes, sir,” says Feenie, almost every trace of sullenness erased from his voice.

  
“I think you impressed him,” Jax observes as Feenie disappears down the cellar stairs with his cronies in tow.

 

Dean tries not to let his pleasure at Jax’s words show.

 

“Let’s go home,” Jax adds. It’s not a suggestion.

 

“Going to fuck me into the mattress?” Dean teases, stepping out into the cool night air, bright moon painting Jax’s face in lines and shadows.

 

“No,” Jax says, leaning close, voice barely more than a hot breath in Dean’s ear.  “I’m going to love you until you know it in every part of you.”

 

Dean shivers, swallows hard, feels something snap in his chest, loosen and move out of him, there and then gone.  Then he’s breathing freely, maybe for the first time in forever.

 

“Oh,” he answers in a voice he doesn’t recognize.

 

“Yeah,” Jax promises, taking his hand.

 

*****

 

**Report Forty-two (Unedited)**

**First Charming Expeditionary Force**

**Twin Falls** **, ID** ****

**28 February 2012**

**Juice Ortiz, driver, munitions**

Holy shit!


End file.
